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'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...
