Friday, June 12, 2015

061215


Last couple of days roaming around the Bozone with a couple of good dudes, looking for fish as the water greens and drops. Yesterday saw us pretty much floating the entire lower half of the Madison Valley, looking for fish eating dries and Salmonflies. Today found us on more of a presidential water, looking for fish that were in the mood for Gongas. Found some of both, both days but I wouldn't quite say we found enough fish doing either.
Ran into Salmonflies at 8-mile yesterday, and fish were on them pretty good late in the day. I say late in the day because we floated from Story to town and hit 8-mile around 5. Dropping water should make it pretty good this weekend and early next week. The thing we ran into yesterday was fish hugging the banks and coming out of the shallow bank undercuts. The undercuts should be getting dried up with sharply decreasing flows which will push more fish into accessible water. The Varney to 8-mile stretch has been pumping, making fishing from the boat more challenging than normal. Hopefully all the Googans stick to the Big Hole this weekend, but I have a feeling I might run into a few tomorrow.
Headed the other direction today with a change of plans late in the day. Still pretty brown and high, most of the fish we saw were hugging the insides of fast seams and along rip rap. Pretty short window for those fish to get to the flies, but enough did to make me think that it ended up being a good day. Had one nice fish on for awhile in fast water and saw a toad try real hard to whack something yellow and in rare supply.
Overall, two long days that have reminded me of why I feel older now than I did a few years ago. The body just hurts a helluva lot more than it used to! But, the experience of floating in cold water, looking for hungry fish is hard to beat in my book. So, I'll pop some Advil, eat and extra chunk of ambien tonight and probably forget about the hurt sooner than I do about that fish that tried to catch that yellow fly.

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