Could our next fly fishing adventure possibly measure up to this one?

Later, we discovered we’d walked right by a bed of peculiar, high-altitude freshwater mussels that live upwards of 100 years, and that a small pack of wolves had taken up residence in the area.

Frankly, I wish I’d seen both (the wolves from a greater distance than the mussels), but both get filed under the heading of “things I didn’t know about, but wish I had when it would have mattered” (yes, I do regret too).

After we’d walked around the meadow back to our ridgeline camp site (no mosquitoes), we sat and watched the sun go down.

The Underground goes all artsy on you.

Because [name redacted] and I aren’t exactly shy about sharing opinions, we dissected the state of fly fishing, the world, the environment and even fly rods (perhaps the most contentious subject).

The discussion was as lively as the day’s fly fishing.

Then the day ended, we went to sleep, and dawn broke, and on a whim, we headed back to the creek we fished a couple days before, reasoning the waters would have fallen, and – yes – the fishing would be even better (apparently I do greed well too).

We expected a triumphant return to the site of our earlier small stream adventure, and on one count, we were rewarded.

Sadly, that count didn’t include as many big trout.

We did catch plenty of Westslope Cutthroats, but the stream had fallen farther than expected, and while the trout weren’t really along the banks, they weren’t all that aggressive in the seams either.

A rare image of the Underground (courtesy [name redacted])

[Name redacted] suggested it had something to do with the trout repositioning themselves in the falling water, taking a day off to fight it out for the better lies, but I cared little.

The fly fishing was still damned good, and the only event marring the adventure was [name redacted]‘s plunge into the river after a rock shifted under him, banging both his knee and his reel.

As he fell, I could tell it was going to hurt a lot, but I’d also just hooked a small trout, which meant I had a difficult decision to make: do I help my friend so he lives another day (live, damnit live!), or do I land the trout?

Given that my heart is pure – so I have the strength of ten men – I managed to do both.

The Gimp Laughs Last

Of course, the lord giveth, and the lord taketh away, and in the “giveth” column, [name redacted] chose to sit on the bank and let his knee recover a bit, and promptly caught 12 trout from one seam (two of which went 12” or so) without so much as moving his ass an inch.

A Nettrout – my favorite.

If you’re like me, you can’t abide showoffs on the river (except when it’s me), so I fished my way upriver. Today’s rod of choice was an 8′ 5wt Diamondglass rod that’s very sweet to cast (though it grows a little less so when it becomes windy).

It was built for me by good friend (Rich Margiotta), a fact which adds considerably to the rod’s already-considerable charms.

I was more than nine days into the Montana Road Trip, and I think my hyper-web-accelerated internal time clock was finally adjusting to the more human pace the outdoors tends to impose on you if given half a chance.

The casts were falling pretty much where I wanted, the fish were eating the dry (not quite as often as I wanted, but that’s almost always the case), and the whole event had acquired a bit of a dreamlike quality.

That’s me. That’s beautiful. (courtesy [name redacted])

It’s in those rare moments of fly fishing grace that you realize that this sport is actually pretty damned cool, and while many define the sport by what’s happening on the waters that see a couple dozen drift boats every day, that might be more a commercial perspective than a sporting one.

I sat on that for a bit, and [name redacted] walked up and asked to borrow the camera.

The Image Maven

I’d taken damn few pictures so far, and was frankly relieved when I didn’t have to worry about stocking the thing with images.

Of course, that’s how we ended up with rare photographs of me in my own fly fishing blog, including a Gripping Series of Photographs So Graphic, That Small Children and the Weak of Heart May Want to Look Away.

Well. Sorta.

[Name redacted] did a nice job of shooting me while I cast at an inside seam (see “That’s Me” photo above), but he showed his Peckinpah-esque cinematic chops when he recorded me hooking and losing the Big Cutthroat Trout of the Day:

A 14″-15″ cutthroat eats, and I set. Hey, this is eas… uh oh…

The skid mark moment when the trout heads downstream and starts kicking my ass.

It’s all knee-deep riffles below; brilliantly, I try to steer the trout into a seam…

Which doesn’t work. He gets off, while I gaze longingly (with an empty net)

OK, maybe it wasn’t exactly Drama In Real Life stuff. Maybe it wasn’t even that exciting from a fishing perspective, but I’ll bet someone could add a soundtrack (Don’t Get Fooled Again by The Who) and give it a little vibration, eh?

Beginning of the End

I’ve got one more wrap-up post planned for the Underground’s Montana Fly Fishing Road Trip, including a few odds-and-ends photos that didn’t fit anywhere else.

Though I’ve written several long posts on the trip, it’s humbling to realize that so much went unsaid and un-photographed.

Then again, we are not video recorders with legs, and if you could experience the fullness of a fly fishing trip on the Internet, then you wouldn’t need all those expensive fly rods or waders.

More to come from Montana. See you on the river, Tom Chandler.

Bonus Graphic: a “Wordle” word cloud graphic of the report.

We’d fished a stream for surprisingly good-sized cutthroat trout, and then headed home to reprovision – and run a little bluelining exercise on [name redacted]‘s topo maps.

Thanks to my benefactor’s Mad Map Skillz, the next morning found us staring at a small stream which – and read this part carefully – may not have been fished this year.

If that doesn’t make the hair on your neck stand up, you’re either not a fly fisherman, or you’re dead.

It looks small, but fished big. And don’t even ask.

The tiny meadow stretch was the prototypical killer small stream.

Deeper-than-expected water, undercut banks, and overhanging vegetation meant trout had plenty of places to hide. And food had plenty of places to grow.

The result?

Plenty of Westslope Cutthroat trout – and even a few Official Char of the Trout Underground (brookies):

The trout weren’t picky, but neither were they stupid.

Like most meadow streams, stealth trumped fly selection, and the ability roll an accurate cast off the rod tip was far more important than tippet size.

And sneaking was good too (it almost always is).

My 8′ 5wt Phillipson bamboo fly rod sometimes felt almost perfect for the job – it’s damned accurate, and throws just the leader with grace.

But it sometimes seemed a little strong for 8″ trout.

Then an 11″ cutthroat would grab the fly and run for a root-studded undercut bank, and suddenly, the rod seemed entirely perfect for the gig (today’s lesson in relative perfectionism).

Meanwhile, [name redacted] had once again latched onto my 8.5′ Diamondglass 4wt, and demonstrated its capacity for this kind of work by landing the day’s winning trout in both the “Length” and “Best Use of Color” categories:

14 inches? We’re not sure, but he’s damned pretty.

We hopscotched each other up the meadow, picking out landmarks for starting points, and waiting for the lower angler to catch up.

We enjoyed plenty of trout, perfect weather, and – due to the utter lack of trampled grass, trails, boot prints, trash or other signs of humanity — the odd feeling that this little meadow stream hadn’t been fished this year.

True? False? We can’t say for sure, but the notion’s almost overwhelmingly romantic.

Looks grueling, eh?

After we’d fished the entire length of the meadow – and stripped several dry flies almost down to bare hook – we set up camp on a windy ridge overlooking a bigger stream, where we fished the next day.

I’ll post that report in a couple days. But stay tuned; I’ve got something interesting in the works for the Undergrounders…

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.

You start wondering about things like that, and the next thing you know you’re digging through texts about the psychology of our hunter-gatherer forebearers, and eventually you just give up and go try to catch a few big trout, which is a lot easier when you know where they are.

A 20″-22″ trout puts a big bend in Raine’s 8.5′ hollowbuilt quad prototype.

Local guide Wayne Eng – sensing I needed a break from the regular beatings meted out by the Upper Sacramento – called and suggested a scouting trip to a private pond.

I’d fished it before, and done well; a fair number of nice trout, and always one big fish.

It’s small, it’s centered in a tiny alpine valley, and later in the year it can get a little weedy. The pond’s been “enhanced” in terms of size, but because that happened years ago, you can’t tell.

That’s me late in the day, speed stripping a streamer (Wayne Eng photo)

Over the years, the edges have softened nicely with weeds and cattails, and the trout — which can’t really reproduce in the lake — were initially stocked in small and large sizes.

Wayne said it hadn’t seen any new fish for over a year, and frankly, I wasn’t expecting much. The cormorants had been hammering the smaller fish, and there’s always the threat of a winterkill when spring’s late in coming.

At least we can scratch the winterkill theory:

The trout were all like this; shoulders like WWF wrestlers.

My final body count was in the vicinity of ten fish. My two smallest went 16″-17″ and my biggest was somewhere in the vicinity of 22″-24″ (most were around 20″).

Naturally, I lost a few – they’d get their big heads in the weeds and that was it – and several real torpedoes chased a streamer I was speed-stripping, which was enough to stop my heart.

Wayne was oddly focused on catching a big trout on a mouse pattern, and he worked it to death in an attempt to prove… well, I can’t imagine what.

He got a few to swirl at it, but never hooked up, and sometimes it happens that way; you’re fly fishing in pursuit not of fish or bragging rights, but to prove an obscure point.

That you catch fewer fish doesn’t much matter, and besides, once you figure catch & release into the mix, it’s clear the pursuit the actually is the point.

The Fish & Gear Portion

All my trout (and two of Wayne’s) were caught on the prototype Hollowbuilt Quad (8.5′ 6wt) loaned to me by Chris Raine, and it handled throwing weighted streamers in the wind about as well as you could expect any rod to.

When I took it apart at the end of the day, it was still arrow straight. In the space of a single afternoon, I think we inflicted several year’s worth of abuse on the rod, a fact which will hopefully put the myth of bamboo’s fragility to the sword.

My first trout ate a small wet fly that looked a little like the water boatmen the trout were chasing.

The fish was huge, and 1/3 of his length was head. His jaw was hooked like a salmon’s and I put him back in the water, couldn’t quite grasp the size of him, and decided I could probably stop for the day without any qualms.

One of Wayne’s bigger fish

I didn’t of course — fly fishermen just talk about doing that stuff to reinforce the perception of our elevated moral sense — and after a while, I started channeling Ian Rutter because I had the sudden urge to speed-strip a rabbit zonker streamer.

On the second cast, a big fish hammered it and tailwalked a good ten feet before throwing the hook.

A minute later — with adrenaline still pumping through my system – another monster trout freight trained it from the side and because I saw the whole thing happen, I instinctively set the hook hard, immediately breaking the 3x tippet.

One of my streamer trout doing his best to break my fly rod.

That’s when I sat down for a few seconds, took a few deep breaths, and reminded myself I wasn’t fishing for bass with a flipping stick and 20 pound test.

I hooked several more on the streamer, and almost as much fun were the fish who followed it and swirled, but never ate it.

Watching the wake of a 22″ trout approach your streamer — and doing nothing about it — is an effective test of your nerve, and after the streamer bite died, I was actually pretty relieved to go back to slow-stripping a nymph.

A streamer trout. Thanks Ian.

Yeah, What is the Point of It All?

This was a rich, weedy pond that at one point hadn’t been much of a fishing hole, and while the fish in there were mostly stocked, they’d survived several years — long enough to lose their hatchery drabness and mangled fins.

In the larger picture, they were pretty damned lucky trout; they’d gone from a concrete runway to a wild place where they’d never actually be hungry, and if trout look up at the surface of the water with anything approaching wonder, they’d see a breathtaking mountain view staring back at them.

Wayne Eng hooked up (in more ways than one)

It’s a great place for fly fishermen to play, and yes — you have to go where the big fish are to catch them — but I get the feeling that bragging too much about the monster trout I caught would be a lot like going to a strip club and bragging about all the boobs I saw.

It’s fun, it’s diverting — and maybe it’s an example of the way the West fished before we screwed it up — but given the number of big fish swimming around in the thing, even a pretty bad fly fishermen could walk away thinking he’s a real predator.

See you on the water, Tom Chandler.

Technorati Tags: fly fishing,fishing,rainbow trout,big rainbow trout,big trout,fly fishing for trout,fly fishing stillwater,bamboo fly rod,raine hollowbuilt quad fly rod,damned straight

The reports about the Upper Sacramento have been uniform; it’s tough sledding right now, even if you stumble across a decent hatch.

Of course, something’s always happening somewhere — a lesson I learned in my bass fishing days, where boat after boat would return to the dock with empty livewells, but somebody always hammered the fish.

With that reality in mind, Steve Bertrand and I ran way downriver, looking for active fish, rising fish, or just hungry, stupid fish.

Yes, I’m crushing Bertrand’s head. Crushing it.

And yes, it’s never a good sign when I lead a fishing report with a "just screwing around" photo — one where I’m crushing Steve Bertrand’s skull with my all-powerful fingers.

That photo suggests — despite covering a lot of river, peering into a lot of water, casting to a lot of promising runs, and burning too much $4/gallon gas — pictures were about all we had to show for our efforts.

 
At least somebody was getting it done.

The river looks great; flows are plenty fishable, water clarity is good, and you can’t look at the better runs without knowing they’re loaded with fish.

Without delving into the gory details, I’ll simply say that I fished a dry and took pictures, while Steven rapidly progressed from dry fly to dry and dropper to serious nymphing rig — with exactly the same results.

Looking, but not finding.

We both knew of places where we probably could catch trout (because Steven had just recently), but damnit — we wanted the motherlode. We wanted to find the fish nobody else had.

Today, Wayne and Steve are off to the Pit River while I stayed behind to <cough> work, and file this all-encompassing fishing report.

Sorta Gear Porn

Raine’s Upper Sac Special (the first [and still solid-built] model) and Velocity Radius

While I’m pretty set on the gear front, I recently scored a heavily discounted Velocity Radius reel at the Sierra Trading Post, and fished it on my Raine Upper Sac Special, which provided a pleasingly smooth, balanced package.

In other words, at least it was warm, and green and sunny, and the casting was good.

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.