I love this video. Few things are funner than getting a trout to eat some kind of crazy fly.  In this case…a baby rattlesnake.  Love it!

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

Last October I was on a float trip fishing the South Fork of the Snake River with my favorite guide Bart Taylor and my cousin.  We were fishing streamers all day and meeting with pretty good success.  Around lunch time, my cousin hooked up with a nice 16-17 inch rainbow trout.  Bart dropped anchor while we landed the fish and snapped a couple photos.  As we released the fish, it slipped from our hands prematurely and started to float on it side down stream. Bart immediately started to pull up anchor so we could retrieve it.  It was seconds after the fish hit the water and a mere 6-8 feet away from the boat, that an eagle swooped down and grabbed the fish from the surface and lighted on another tree to eat his prize catch. Needless to say, this took us all by surprise.  I just missed accidentally capturing the moment on camera as I took a photo of the fish right as it was dropped (picture to the left).  Bart says he didn’t see what had happened, but knew something strange was happening because he could feel the gust of wind as the eagle pulled back just before hitting the fish.  He looked up just after the fish was taken.  We all looked at each other to make sure we hadn’t just hallucinated the whole thing after hours of slinging lead.  We looked up to see another eagle sitting in a bare cottonwood tree, presumably waiting for us to drop him another snack.  I think the first bird must have left his perch the moment that … 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