Sorted by date Results 51 - 65 of 65
Once again we'll be going to my friend Jim's place for Thanksgiving. Among other things, our camaraderie is rooted in flyfishing. And as is so often true of flyfishers, our commonality extends to other things, other areas of interest, other affinities. The usual crowd consists of three or four couples of empty nesters, depending on who will travel out-of-state to visit the children, or which kids will make the trek home this year. It just sort of happened, over time, that this tradition...
When I was a kid I was fascinated by trout flies. It seemed almost inborn. It started when I was about eight when my godfather showed me a box of flies that he tied. There was a sporting goods store in my small home town that sold .22 rifles and ammo, among other things, and I took to shooting at an early age. My dad and my godfather instructed me carefully and well. My dad had the stock of my first .22 sawed off so it would fit a boy. There was a small assortment of flies in the store where...
The past few snowy days have driven me indoors. And I'm at home here. I'm not house-bound, yet, but will be by the end of February. Until then there is plenty to do: on several sides I'm faced with an unending pile of clutter to be sorted out as it gets added to while deciding which of it to discard; there are abandoned manuscripts in the computer that need an infusion of interest; there are the musical instruments - guitars, a banjo and a mandolin – on their stands next to the computer s...
I had an invitation from a friend to do one last float before he put his boat up for the season. The weather was due to turn cloudy and cool. We were looking for a blue-winged olive mayfly hatch to bring some fish o the top, and a day of fry fly fishing to top off our season. Before our schedules cleared, a midweek chance of rain prediction morphed into four inches of snow and a stretch of chilly – or downright cold – days to go with it. I used to be up for launching and loading a raft in tho...
The leaves are just turning color along favorite stretches of my home river; they're likely doing the same along your river, too. Wherever you fish there's a certain feel to taking your fly rod for a walk along a river in autumn that doesn't come anywhere else at any other time. It's meditative and can fill your soul with what it needs. You don't get that same sense at other times, or if you do, it's likely something you brought to the river yourself; the things that surround your senses and...
It was an unusual sight. If you glanced at it driving by, you'd do a second take, have a second look. There were a bunch of high school kids, standing in a neat row with fly lines unfurling in pretty loops behind them, (normal enough for a Montana high school) but these kids looked weird – and weirdly out of place. It was Homecoming Week at Hamilton High. And the dress theme for the day was Hippies and Hicks. You'd see everything from dirty jeans, muck boots and dilapidated straw hats on one t...
I remember standing thigh-deep in the Missouri River one afternoon, changing spools on my reel. That's a tricky maneuver. More on how to do that later. The breeze (you'd call it wind in other places) had just died down and every blue-winged olive mayfly in that stretch of river decided it was time to hatch. The trout in the channel between weed beds I had been fishing with a streamer decided to eat them. I'd seen big trout get silly like that before. When there are hoards of blue-winged olives...
'I call the big orange fall caddis the iceberg hatch." "Why is that?" my friend asked. "Because ninety percent of the action is underwater. If you're fishing on top you miss most of it." His face lit up in a knowing smile. I was talking with Gary LaFontaine, who probably knew more about caddisflies, the flies to imitate them, and when and how to fish them, than anybody. His landmark book, Caddisflies, was published in 1981 and remains a bestseller among flyfishing books. An original copy in...
When he was a young boy, my son Matthew spent Saturdays at the fly shop with daddy. He had just turned four when he approached my fly tying bench and asked, "Daddy, what kind of a bug is that you're making?" He called all flies that we tied bugs, and enjoyed tying his own - with a little assistance when needed from daddy. We'd fish our bugs on these latesummer and fall evenings. We'd find places where he could fish with little or no wading on the inside corner of a gentle riffle, where he could...
Fly fishers are a curious lot: They'll leave home and drive halfway across the state or into another, burning up two tanks of gas at today's prices to haul hundreds if not thousands of dollars' worth of gear with them to use for a few hours when they arrive. They do this because they heard rumors of a flurry of harmless bugs flying over the water somewhere else. Here in Montana that's considered normal behavior. This time of year we see lots of little bugs, some medium-sized ones, and a few big...
My guide client and I were crouched tight under my portable table – we dared not reach out for any of the food we'd left on top of it. The sound of a thousand drums assaulted our ears as hailstones the weight of big round ice cubes totally destroyed our lunch. The hailstorm slowed to silence within less than a minute after what must have been a ten minute or longer onslaught. We crept out through the hail balls piled at our feet to find my client's fly rod leaned against the leeward side of a t...
Let’s start with hoppers. By now every trout in every river should be geared into taking big grasshoppers, as they have been around all summer and bungled their way into rivers. That’s been partially true this year – until our recent heavy storms knocked them off, drowned them on land, and kept them out of the water. The fish have remained keyed on them – somewhat. What they’re seeing now will more likely be a new wave of grasshoppers – young insects ranging from #14 and #12 imitations on up. If the trout you’re prospecting for don’t take th...
Hannah Baron Spencer is a tall athletic woman with an engaging presence and winsome smile. She is a wife and the mother of lively twins living a homestead way of life on the Salmon River; she’s also a fly fishing and whitewater rafting guide, and an artist. The vibrant colors of her primitive woodblock prints capture visions of the life she lives. To take a look, go to www.hbsartworks.com. I met Hannah before her marriage and move to Salmon, when she was living in the Bitterroot Valley. She was equally at home wearing her broad-brimmed straw h...
A few days ago the morning sky was shrouded in dark gray. The traffic on the East Side Highway, usually clear and visible from my perch above it, moved slowly, like wraiths passing slowly through the barely-visible edge of the mist. You wouldn't even know the mountains were there if you hadn't seen them beforehand. The valley could be a mostly flat plain in eastern Montana or Nebraska for all that we could see. By mid-afternoon the day heated up just enough to evaporate some of that dense moist...
"A River Never Sleeps" is a simple but profound pronouncement; Roderick Haig-Brown wrote that phrase as the title of what many consider his best book. No other angling author captures the essence of fly fishing in words as Haig-Brown did. Some might grab it for a sequence of phrases, a paragraph or an entire passage; none did it as well as Haig-Brown for the length of an entire book. He wrote from a sense of intimacy with his home river, the Campbell on Victoria Island in British Columbia. The...
