JT with a Mo River Brown…a standard 20 incher
This past week was spent guiding on the Missouri for 3 days and then the Madison for 3 days. Both rivers are flowing huge and I am beat. Back up to the Missouri tomorrow for 6 days…..and some dry fly fishing. Rowing the Madison at anything over 1900 cfs is a serious work out. …add the flows of the creeks and it gets much bigger. At these flows, I make one stroke of the oars every other second – all day long. Sure there are a few pauses between oar strokes which are longer, but not many. At that rate, one will make about 14,400 oar strokes per 8 hours on the river….yes we do actually work.
YEP……there are salmonflies on the Madison River. I floated from Varney to Town today and had good fishing with rubbers leg stones, #12 PTs, and #12 Sally nymphs. I did see the big bugs, but only about a half dozen flying in the air. There are not many nymphs in the grass hatching, but the rocks just off the bank are full of them…..any day….any day. I actually saw a trout eat one, then promptly threw dries for 40 minutes and not even a looker……we went back to nymphing and continued to hook nice brown trout.
Molly & I floating the Madison.