Salmon Trout Steelheader 1984
Scallawagglers, aka Rapalicas
It wasn't freezing but it was cold enough to make my fingers
stiff and the fishing was lousy. There were three of us: my wife
Adele my friend Randy and me. We were drifting a deep narrow
brush choked stretch of river near the three forks of the
Missouri River at Logan Montana. We had been fishing hard for
nearly two hours without a single strike.
/fragments/Flies/Sandy-Pittendrigh/Articles/Wigglers/BigNLittle
It was early in November. The farmers had closed their
irrigation ditches for the year bringing the water level up a
good four or five inches higher than in October. Despite an
intensely bright sun and a cloudless sky, the river looked and
felt like winter because a heavy wet snow storm had stripped the
cottonwoods and the willows of their last remaining leaves. There
were long feathery plumes of snow blowing off the peaks of the
Tobacco Root Mountains to the west. The water was cold a little
off color and fast. It was clear the fish would be lying
in deep water--and that dry fly fishing was totally out of the
question.
After the first two hours of drifting the river it seemed
wet flies were out of the question too. We were throwing so
much lead we had to duck our heads as we cast. Randy had been
fishing a Royal Wulff for the last ten or fifteen minutes. He
said it was more fun to get skunked on a dry fly than to get
skunked slinging lead. It was my turn to fish. I tied on a big Count
Down Rapala I pulled off a bush on the Beaverhead River earlier in the year.
Randy, a dry fly purist at heart, made a sickly face when he saw what I
was up to.
My first lob-cast hit the water with a splash followed by
four or five feet of fly line coiled over the spot where the lure
hit the water. I pulled in the slack line as fast as I could.
Rather than dragging against the current and pulling straight up
to the surface as our weighted nymphs and streamers had, the
diving-bill caught the current and wiggled down into about four
or five feet of water, deeper than we had been able to fish all
day.
Boom, just a few seconds into the first cast and I had on a
beautiful 18 inch male brown trout, still in its darkest spawning
colors. Another cast brought another fish, then a missed strike,
and then another fish. In a dozen casts I netted and released
six fish, all brown trout over sixteen inches long! There was a
large foam covered eddy behind a cottonwood sweeper coming into
view. I was waiting for just the right moment to cast when Randy
suddenly jumped up from the rower's seat threw his arms around
me and started yelling at me to give him the rod. I thought he
was trying to stop me from catching any more fish with the
Rapala so I made one last desperate cast with Randy bear-
hugging me and reaching for the rod. The lure landed in the
cottonwood roots and my fly line snapped off at the leader knot.
I told Randy he'd been overzealous in defending the purity of
fly-fishing. Actually he'd been overcome in a moment of weakness.
"I wanted to fish with the Rapala," he said.
I sat down and took over the oars while Randy practiced
casting with a white-winged dry fly of some kind.
Someone else might have decided to buy a spinning rod and box full of lures.
But I like to fish with a fly rod. It was clear: I needed to figure out
how to make lightweight divers...divers I could more easily cast with a
fly rod.
Lateral-Line-Wigglers.htm
Lateral-Line-Wigglers.htm