Interesting Things

Nothing like starting off the day with meeting the clients and noticing thatyour trailer wheel is about to fall off in the parking lot. The good guys at Tire Rama played like a NASCAR pit crew, replaced the bearings and had me out the door in 20 minutes. Impressive! Ended up on the lower Yellowstone, decent hopper bite, decent nymphing, pretty weedy on that particular stretch of the river though. The day started off clear and warm, ended cold and wet. All in all, a very good couple of days with Dent et. al as usual.

Back to the lower madison today. Got a late start as not too may people have been fishing it and it's been fishing well enough that a mad bomb down the middle has been working just fine. Well, we got to Warm Springs about 9:30 were the first one there, there were 9 other rigs there about 10 minutes into the ordeal so I went elsewhere. I guess everyone was expecting crap weather and a short float today.

Fishing was different today, not much love on the big stuff but the small flies were working very well. I finally gave up on the cawdad after lunch and just fished 2 small nymphs with a size 8 split shot. It worked well. The fish are eating some Pseudos and lots of Black Fly pupae right now, but they always have some crayfish in their mouth and crap this time of year too. You can tell I have a good day over there when my boat looks like it ran through  Red Lobster.

One of the guys I fished with today snuck a Tenkara rod onto the boat this morning. These are a Japanese thing that is picking up some traction here in the states with anglers looking for something different and a new way to fish overgrown, small streams. The rods telescope, have no reel, use a tapered mono leader with some tippet on it about 20 ' in length. A few guys around town have them so I was familiar with the game plan when he pulled it out. Plinkin buckets with the rod made sense but I think it would be pretty tough to successfully land fish much over 15". I'm sure it's been done plenty of times but it would require some skill and more luck. (You gots to love the rod in mouth here!)