Today was another SLOW fishing day with a lot of walking and casting.  We started out on the Henry’s Fork in Box Canyon.  I hooked into a pretty big trout that unfortunately I didn’t land.  I landed a couple of little fish.  One big drawback was that the water was milky and made it tough to see what was going on.  On the plus side there was a tremendous hatch of mahogany duns, blue winged olives, and caddis, but it didn’t really seem to get the fish looking up.  We had fun watching an osprey fishing and saw some other cool birds.

We decided to move to the Madison and see if we could do any better. The water there was really nice and I was able to land a nice brown trout on a little bead head pheasant tail I was dropping behind an elk hair caddis.  Paul hooked and flung way may be the smallest trout ever taken on a fly.  It was smaller than my index finger (see the web album link.” Thankfully the scenery and company makes up for the very slow fishing.

7th Annual OOF Day 2

Today we floated the Madison River from Palisades down to some other place I can’t remember the name of.  On our way to the river from West Yellowstone we stopped at an old favorite fishing spot, but my new mecca, the fly shop at Slide Inn.  The streamer selection there was unbelievable.  You have to love a shop that has more streamers than any other flies.  We picked up some crazy articulated flies and started out the day with high hopes.  Fishing was very slow going. It took us a while to get into some fish.  I ended up catching two nice rainbows on a black conehead sculpin.  Otherwise we hooked only a few more fish for the entire 11 miles of floating.  We worked hard and landed a brown trout, a big whitefish, and a bunch of small rainbows.  In all the day was nice, but the fish were few and far between.  Now, where to fish tomorrow?!

7th Annual OOF Day 1

Thisisflydaily.com recently posted a you tube video showing a French guy landing an absolutely monstrous brown trout on a fly rod.  The thing is ridiculously huge.  What I can’t figure out is why during the entire video, the guy is losing his waders until they are eventually around his ankles.  Thankfully he is wearing some swimming trunks. Video below:

My good friend’s production company recently produced a video for the new Toshiba product called the Libretto (links here and here).  He wanted to put some fishing photos in part of the demo so he borrowed a few from my collection.  You’ll notice from :15-:20 a photo gallery with three fishing themed images. The images are the brown trout, me standing on a log in front of the Tetons, and a group of buddies I fished with recently, I don’t know who the bikini girl is, she certainly wasn’t fishing. I guess this 5 seconds will be deducted from my overall 15 minutes of fame budget.  Hopefully that leaves me enough time to still do something awesome.  Click for the full video:

Big Weber River brown trout

Wildlife biologists in Utah have been busy in recent weeks conducting gill net and electroshock studies on local fisheries.  Generally the reports have been quite positive.  Here are links to some of the results:

• Weber River survey report (via Salt Lake Tribune Fishing Blog)
• Big tigers and wild browns (via Utah DWR)
• Flaming Gorge survey report – big fish (via Salt Lake Tribune Fishing Blog)

Let’s get out and get some!

Brown trout. Credit: USFWS

I did a more exploring of local urban creeks last weekend and I can only report that I am more amazed than ever.  My latest expedition found several wild browns that were absolute bruisers in the 16-17 inch range.  I’m not even sure if these fish have ever seen a fly, but I can assure you they will soon.  Now I just need to figure out how to get a good drift through the shopping cart they were hiding in.  Seriously though, I am really amazed at how resilient these browns are living in all the trash and pollution they must endure.  There was a nice mayfly hatch coming off too.  I didn’t ever get to catch one for a closer look, but they were about a size 14-16 and a dusky gray as far as  I could tell.  I can’t wait to wet my line in pursuit of these beauties. Hopefully more to come on this saga.

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I had a great outing yesterday (Jan 20, 2010) to the middle section of the Provo River in Midway, UT.  It also happened to be my birthday.  I was very excited to get up there and had been planning this trip for a couple of weeks.  I got to the north parking lot around 10:30 AM and just as the snow was letting up. This combination turned out to be the right one as the fish were very active and hungry.  As soon as the snow stopped falling and the sun started to peak through the clouds there was a healthy hatch of black midges that had the fish feeding heavily.

I had in mind for sometime that I was going to fish streamers and try and get at some of the larger browns.  So that is the approach I took.  Within 10 minutes I had already landed two nice brown trout, the second being the fish of the day at just under 18 inches (to the left).  They were both aggressive strikes that left no doubt I was on the right track.  I was fishing an olive cone head sculpin pattern that is a cross between a muddler minnow and a wooly bugger.  I worked my way around through a few more runs and gave in to the siren song of the rising fish, but soon changed back as I was having a hard time seeing my flies in the light conditions.  In all I fished for about 6 hours and landed about 7 trout all of them quality fish.  Perhaps what I found most striking was how beautifully they colored … Continue Reading

I had a great outing today on the Lower Provo River in Provo Canyon, UT.  It started off rather sketchy as the day was really snowy and I wasn’t sure if my 20 year old Honda Accord was up to the task, but I figured if I just took it easy I could get there without any issue.  My usual 40 minute drive was more like 80 minutes, but once I got there I found I had the whole stretch to myself.  I went to Vivian Park and fished up from the bridge.  Given then weather I determined I would be nymphing.  It was about 18-20 degrees Fahrenheit and a constant snow was falling.  I had in mind to fish a fly I haven’t used in a while; a big, juicy cranefly larva pattern about size 6.  I trailed it with a size 14 red fox squirrel nymph.  For weight I used a BB size split shot and an 8 ft leader with 5x tippet.  On my fifth cast of the day, I took a nice brown trout about 15 in long.  It took to the air straight away after being hooked.  Once I landed it, I could see that he had eaten the cranefly larva.  Over the next 10 minutes minutes I landed two more fish both were mountain whitefish of decent size and both foul hooked.  I think they were taking the cranefly and I was hooking them with the RFSN.  The cranefly was big enough they couldn’t fit it in their tiny mouths.  I hooked 3 or 4 more browns ranging from 11-14 inches and all on the cranefly.  The fish of day had to be the 18 inch rainbow that was a healthy slab of … Continue Reading