The River Drops

In case anyone has noticed I changed my display name to Montana Wooly Bugger. Skeeter was my nick name when I was a kid. I thought it might make a good display name but it just didn’t feel right. With my beard I figure I look a little wooly and I live in Montana. The wooly bugger is my go to fly that usually will work for me when all else has failed. This wasn’t the case yesterday. I fished the MO which recently has dropped to 13,400 cfs. I hoped fishing would be a bit better as a result and it was. I started out with my usual routine of deep water nymphing and then running a streamer over the water before moving on. Early in the day I lost the wooly bugger I was using to a bad snag. A bad snag is one where you can’t get the fly free and resort to breaking it off. You get a lot of snags deep water nymphing or in this case streamer fishing. If you aren’t on the bottom you aren’t going to catch fish. So after losing the bugger I decided to try a flashy coffee colored streamer. It was fish on from there I caught a couple on the nymph rig, but the streamer accounted for the vast majority of the fish caught. Like the nice brown, and a 21 inch rainbow. I had probably 25 to 30 strikes and hooked around 20 fish. I landed somewhere around 10. It seemed like every time I tossed the streamer into fishy looking water I got a tug. I’m not counting on spot that about drove me nuts. I fished a spot and got a tug on every second or third cast but when I tried to set the hook there was nothing there. I did notice a few small (really small for the MO) fish probably 6 to 8 inches rising and figured it was these small fish hitting the streamer which was about half as big as the fish. The fish probably weren’t able get the hook into their mouth. Whatever was going on I go a bunch of tugs but only once was anything there when I set the hook. That was the one time I did feel something solid. I think I just pulled the hook out of the fish’s mouth because I hadn’t hesitated to allow the fish to turn after the strike. A great day of fishing and catching was had. The usually cigar and bourbon on the porch at the end of the day was had of course. Thanks to anyone taking the time to read this and if I can stop fishing long enough I’ll figure out how to put picture in here to make this a little more interesting.