Skwalapalooza '06

Clark Fork River

A weekend on the river in Montana is tough to complain about. Even if the water was high and brown and the fish didn't rise you were out there, in Montana. You've met new friends and were pleased to see old friends so it wasn't a bad trip, that weekend in Montana.

March Brown Update

Still not much of an emergence, maybe next week. Flows above Deer Creek were ~600 CFS.

Cutthroat

Westslope Cutthroat

Monday night the West Seattle Posse got together to rob me of half my allowance. Poker that is. The big winner was a gracious enough to buy me breakfast the next morning.
I ordered the usual; 2 eggs OM, hash browns, english muffin and a cupp-a-joe.
JT had his usual, whatever that is.
We scarffed it all down and were on the road by 0930hrs, bright and early.
Pulled off in a little mountain town for gas, JT kicked in for that too, must be learning manners up there in Eh-Land.
As far as the WDFW is concerned the year starts April 1st so we had to pick up new fishing licenses. JT lives in Canada but he convinced the kid behind the counter that he's still a Washington resident.
After all that noise we still managed to get on the water before the hatch. The first thing we discovered was that beavers had altered the flow of the river reducing side channel johansen to a mere trickle.
Its possible that the the high flows had actually changed the streambed but I'm not prepared to let the beavers off that easy.
There are hardly any fish in this river so the trick is to be exactly where the fish are exactly when the hatch is coming off. JT worked the head of a nice pool upstream of the side channel and I worked a rip rap bank well downstream. We both managed the "trick" well enough considering that the hatch was pretty thin. I landed two cutts and a 'bow. WT, I mean JT (thats what Sven calls him) landed three 'bows and a whitey. We weren't competing but if we were I think I would have won.

Blown

March 30, 06. The March Brown Drake hatch has begun in earnest but there weren't enough of the big mays to raise any fish. I had to fish with nymphs, stonefly with a pheasant tail dropper. The pheasant tail took three rainbows and a bunch of whitefish.