Fishing the Big Freestone Rivers
As challenging as heavily fished smooth water fish can be I find the spring creeks and the tail waters easy in comparison to the Yellowstone and the Madison. The spring creeks have a peak season routine that's not that hard to learn. You need someone to show you the ropes at first and then it's all about practice practice practice. The tail waters are not much different. There are challenging times on the spring creeks, like late afternoons late in the season or at pseudocloeon I time on the tail-waters. In the meantime I find the freestone water as tough or even tougher then the smooth ones.
The prime guiding season on the big freestone rivers like the Gallatin, Yellowstone, Jefferson Big Hole and most of the Madison is early summer when the rivers are still high and bank full, and even a bit off color. Among other things that's perhaps the easiest time of year to fish because the fish are so often holding tight to the banks. That's the best time to be a guide on the big rivers. But there is a lot more to the big rivers story than just early Summer.
A few stubbornly determined fishermen I know try to catch a fish every month of the year, like my buddy Zac Sexton. It isn't always possible but it sometimes is. Fifteen above zero Fahrenheit can make it impossible to move line through the guides but you don't really have to. You can overhead or roll cast 30 or 40 feet of line, mend it a lot and walk backwards up the bank when you hook a fish. I'm not into it but it is important, I think, to know what the real boundaries are.
In late February some years we get Chinook winds that blow in from the Northwest with temperatures well above freezing. Wind is the limiting factor then but it is often possible for the determined fishermen to find calm periods late in a Chinook day, when a few hours of fishing can be a rewarding time after a long bitter cold Montana Winter.
In March it all begins to change. Wind storms and dangerous Spring blizzards are not uncommon. But so too are sunny days without much wind. Cloudy days without wind are rare but they are the best of all. I've had some of the best no boat wade fishing of a lifetime on the Madison below the Beartrap Canyon in March. When nothing appears to be happening you can fish Willy Self Laser Midges trailing behind a stonefly nymph. The midges can start hatching suddenly too, at any time of day. You can fish wet flies to midge-dimpling fish or small Renegades or a Griffith's Gnat.
Early season cold water fishing is a good time for what my life long fishing friend Patrick calls "BB fishing." BB I fishing is a bit like Czech Nymphing, deep and slow with lots of weight and hardly ever a long cast. But with BB fishing the weight goes on the leader instead of the fly itself, maybe 18" inches above an unweighted nymph. You need instinctive radar for BB fishing. The strikes are never obvious. Setting the hook frequently helps a lot.
The early season on the big freestone rivers is also a good time for fishing slow streamers in deep water, somewhat similar to the "Winter Water" spots I mentioned earlier in a tail water context. By the time April comes the fishing can get really good. Most of the really big fish get caught in March and April. I don't have an explanation why but so it is. And in April the small fly fishing can get hot as a pistol too, when the spring Baetis and a few scattered March Browns and Skwala Stoneflies begin to appear. The early season is a treat for the locals only. It doesn't make sense for tourists to come at this time of year because it could plunge down to near zero with driving, blinding ground blizzards at any time. You have to be a local who keeps rod a ready to go at all times. In May, if it isn't storming the Mother's Day Caddis hatch blesses all the rivers, tail water and freestone. Lots of people rave about dry fly fishing during the Mother's Day Caddis. On some of our rivers the Mother's Day hatch can last for a week or more. The hatch itself is triggered by warming water temperatures, whicn on the Yellowstone can mean three days of clear water fishing at most. On the Yellowstone the caddis can be so thick it becomes difficult to spot your fly among the multitudes of real ones. I have better luck swinging soft hackle wet flies across and down, so I can set the hook when I feel a tug. During the Mother's Day Caddis hatches the fish usually move off the banks a bit to take advantage of smooth flowing feeding stations. But as long as the water levels are high it's not long before they head back to the banks again.
In the weeks leading up to the salmon fly hatch on the Big Hole the river is pregnant with water and fish, many of them holding tight to the banks where you can probe them with weighted stonefly hymphs and streamers.
On most of the other freestones the weeks leading up to the salmon fly hatch are peak runoff time. A lot of people think you cannot fly fish during spring runoff. I do it a lot and I have good success too. I'll cover runoff fishing in a later section. After the run off we get the prime tourist season. This is when the guides really have to be busy. This is bread and butter time. For drift boat fishing on any given big Montana River, especially so in the early Summer season, bank fishing is often the way to go. On the Madison above Ennis in March and April, when the water is still high and half brown, there are no tourists and bank fishing with streamers can be spectacular. By mid to late June to early July, depending on the river at hand, the bank fishing often starts to slow down.
When I worked at the Yellowstone Angler I learned the importance of anchoring up and getting out to fish what we called "riffle corners," typically but not always where the river took a bend and a long frothy riffle dumped off into a deeper rolling run. The fish are sometimes all the way up into the fast water in the riffles, foraging in highly oxygenated water. On nymphs. Sometimes they're at the transition from fast to slow and sometimes even further down yet in the first few yards of the deep rolling run immediately downstream from the riffle. The Yellowstone is getting crowded in prime time these days. Most boats are hugging the banks the entire way down. All Summer long. The few you see anchored up at the riffle corners, high-sticking the riffles with various nymphs are almost always guides and their customers.
So far so good. But later in the season when the water drops precipitously and the water temperatures rise the fish move off the banks on the Yellowstone and the Big Hole, and maybe to a lesser extent on the Madison too. The Madison is a bit of an odd duck because it is a tail water fishery that looks more like a freestone. On the real freestones in late summer the banks become a heavily pounded wasteland populated by fishermen but not so much by fish. Instead of tossing your flies right up to the bank, like pitching pennies at a concrete stair, you are usually better off trolling flies ten feet off the bank where there is some depth and moderate current.
I remember a mid Summer Madison trip with Greg Lilly where we had four guys and hence two boats. I think we floated from Varney Bridge all the way to Ennis that day which is a long float. I made a bad mistake and got my boat upstream from Greg's, which made it possible for my customers to witness Greg catching three times as many fish as we were. This was early in my guiding career and I was till figuring things out. I was hugging the deep banks constantly. Greg did a little of that too but he was also fishing deep runs in the middle of the river. He anchored up a lot too but they never got out of the boat. He was stopping at well known deep water runs and dredging stonefly nymphs.
The late Bobby DiAmbrosio who had a fly shop a bit East of Ennis in the early 1980s (Bobby had one of my early boats back then too, and loved it) once told me, about mid to late Summer fixing on the Madison, that he liked to think about dividing the river into five strips. In his mind he threw out the two edge strips and the middle and concentrated on the two remaining river strips either side of dead middle. That made sense in Bobby's case because, in those days, most of his customers wanted to fish Royal Wulffs. Bobby often fished a dropper rig so he had two Royal Wulffs floating from each rod. All day long.
Fishing that way with Royal Wulffs does, to some degree anyway, rule out the deep fast water in the middle of the river. But not if you are fishing with heavy streamers or dredging stonefly nymphs. I feel a little vulnerable here. I've never been much of a Madison above Ennis guide. I'm more of a Gallatin and Yellowstone Park and Yellowstone River and spring creeks guy. There are so many guys who know the Madison a thousand times better than I do. I can say I've had some of my best ever fishing on the Madison while concentrating on deeper runs in the middle of the river, rather than the banks.
When the fishing gets really slow during the hottest days in late August the fish--on all the big freestone rivers--migrate to deeper heavy water fast spots where the biggest waves on the river dump down onto deep cavernous pools, like the big riffle a hundred feet or so above the rip rap wall adjacent to the Jumping Rainbow subdivision on the Yellowstone. The water in those places is fast and furious on top only. A few feet below the waves the water is almost still, or even recirculating back upstream at the bottom with still water in between. Those places are difficult to fish. But not impossible. That's where the late season hot days fish are.
Guides on Utah's Greene River run out of hatches in late August and the fishermen they get at that time of year are often the least experienced customers of the season. That's a tough nut to crack. Guides are working men with families at home and payments to make. They do what they have to do. I've seen those Utah guys keep a balloon rod in the boat. When they do get to one of those rolling heavy water pour-overs on a sweltering late summer day they sometimes anchor up a few few feet upstream and get the balloon rods ready to go. What they use in those situations is a six or seven inches in diameter balloon attached to a long stout leader with two very heavy scuds or nymphs at the end. You don't cast that rig. You flop it off the side of the boat and troll it. After plopping the balloon into the water the guide rows backward long enough to get some distance between the balloon and the side of the boat. And then starts to drift forward. I'm not interested in fishing that way anymore than you are. But it is interesting and useful information. On hot exceedingly bright days in late summer when the fishing seems to be almost impossible--at those times the fish are all highly concentrated in giant schools beneath deep fast heavy water. There are ways to make use of that information that do not involve bobbers balloons or even boats for that matter.
The son of my fishing buddy Patrick is now an extreme scuba diver who travels the world fixing off shore oil rigs. Peter even worked a year on the Achille Lauro when it sank in the Mediterranean. Peter is one of the world's best extreme conditions divers. He makes good money too. Peter put on snorkeling gear with a heavy belt and long flippers late one August and swam 20 miles on the Yellowstone, not too many years ago. Peter is the one who really sunk the late season deep fast water story home for me. Peter said the river seemed barren and almost devoid of fish, until he got to the big fast wave pour-overs. There are a lot of those places. On the hottest most sweltering low water weeks of summer's end--that's where all the fish are. Thousands of them, packed tightly together in huge schools. They have good cover there and the water has the most oxygen in those places. If you want to catch fish at slowest hottest time of year, on the big rivers, look for deep heavy water and consider using a sparkplug rig. It works.
When I get to those late summer heavy water pour-overs I use a Sparkplug fly, which is like an extra heavy sparsely dressed bonefish fly with a bead head nymph or soft hackle wet fly trailing a short distance behind the Sparkplug. There is no bobber (or balloon) and it works. I first started to figure this out on late season Big Hole trips when the water there is extra skinny. Fly fishing the banks in conditions like that is an exercise in futility. During a few of those trips I began to notice weekend rafters from Butte who troll Thomas Cyclone Spoons of the back of their rafts. Their heavy spoons bounce and snag along the bottom smack in the middle of the river. They do catch a lot of fish. In August. When the skinny banks are almost barren and devoid of fish.
Fall Fishing on the Freestones
When I think about Fall fishing I think about migratory fish. Jerry Wells who once many moons ago headed the Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks told me about an uncommonly large male brown trout that was tagged on the Ruby River near Alder one year, and then captured and re-tagged again the following Fall in the Beartrap Canyon of the Madison. Holly cow. That's close to 50 miles downstream to Three Forks and then another 50 miles back upstream again to the Beartrap. Big migratory browns are often found in gravelly runs on main-stem rivers in Fall. They' re found in surprisingly small creeks too. Back in the 1990s when I guided on the CA Ranch a lot one of the Anderson brothers told me he regularly saw large 4lbs plus brown trout in Sixteen Mile Creek, in late October and November. I don't mind mentioning that spot now because it's all closed to fishing now. To the public anyway. The CA Ranch recently sold for $138 million dollars.
I built a green house for an Episcopal Minister in Bozeman once, a fun guy who's hobby was gunsmithing. They had a small house right on a small creek on the Northeast side of Bozeman. I built that green house in early November. While climbing around on the framing I watched a good five pound hen brown trout hover over a redd while a covey of smaller very aggressive males tried to gain access to the hen. The males fought with each other constantly. That creek was maybe 12" inches deep and 12' feet across there. In the Fall season in Montana almost anything goes. Big fish can be holding in oddly unexpected places.
Fall fishing isn't always about boat trips. On the East Gallatin River and various increasingly difficult to access Gallatin Valley spring creeks the Fall Baetis hatches can be very good. On the smaller streams you are sometimes forced to fish downstream, which isn't my favorite way in the small flies sipping pods context. You make the best of what ever comes your way.
The Fall Baetis are never as thick on the freestone rivers as they are on the tail waters, but they do happen and the fish do pay attention, usually in relatively slow moving slick water below riffle corners or at the tail ends of long pools. Sipping pods of whitefish and rainbows are a good place to swing streamers. You don't strip streamers in situations like that. You swing them with an occasional pause created by momentarily dropping the rod tip.
November is a gift to those of us who live here. You can't make arrangements to come fish in Montana in November unless you are willing to lose the trip. It can snow or get cold or blow like a hurricane at any time. Or be sunny. Or be cloudy and above freezing. That's what you most want.
In late November, if it hasn't frozen up yet, you can fish the big reservoirs from the bank. The big lake rainbows spend most of the summer out in the middle of the lake in deep water. But in November they intermittently cruise the banks in small schools of fish that start at 20" inches or so. And get larger too. I caught a twelve pound carp in November once, on a big foam hopper that was part of a hopper-dropper rig, while chasing marauding rainbows. Late Fall reservoir fishing is a fun time.
Notes:
I Soft not lead BBs...........are bigger but so what...