Seems like May is always a good month for fishing. My two best days of the year came along in May last year, and my best one so far this year was too. Last Sunday Shane and I decided to take a little road trip and hit Between the Lakes on the Upper Madison. Bear hunting hasn’t really gotten good, flows are starting to come up, and we both felt the itch to get out of town.
Fueled by some very strong coffee from Nancy at Beartooth Fly Fishing (when she says “careful it’s the early brew and might be a little strong”, take heed) we got up there a little later than we figured. To our pleasure and surprise the crowds weren’t bad at all. Having not fished this stretch much at all and having heard many stories of the “combat fishing”, I imagined shoulder to shoulder crowds all day.
Due to the fact that we were going to be fishing some big water and that I am part of the team at Swing the Fly Magazine, I brought the switch rod along. I don’t know jack shit about spey casting, but I’ve always, always wanted to learn more. A day spent flailing around trying to form a decent D loop might give me some valuable practice…
When you hook into a big fish in the first 20 minutes of the day and end up chasing him downstream hooting and hollering as you watch your line rip off the reel is a good way to start the trip, even if the fish comes up and shakes your hook with a massive headshake. (Side note on that fish, I saw him roll and it was quite possibly the largest fish I’d ever seen in a river)
I got into three good fish right off the bat, followed by a bit of a lull. We walked downstream for a couple hundred yards, losing flies and rigging one after another as we went. I don’t think I’ve lost that many flies in a long time. Eventually, we ended up in a decent run, and we had it all to ourselves.
One of the things that really gets me about fishing is those days when you are trying every fly in the box and nothing seems to work until you stumble upon, by sheer dumb luck, the magic fly. There were four of them in the box, and by the end of the day they were all gone. For almost an hour and a half that fly was enticing a bite almost every five minutes. I honestly don’t remember how many fish I caught in that stretch, but I do remember the smallest of them was around 15 inches.
The fishing slowed down after that. Shane got a nice old warrior of a brown on a swung streamer, and I was sorely tempted to go grab the 5-weight in the car when a couple of sporadic risers showed up. I’m not quite sure I was doing it right, but as the day wore on my spey casting got a little better. It’s a pretty cool feeling when that long rod loads up and you can bomb out a big cast…
We fished upstream, downstream, new water, old water, both got sunburned as hell, shot almost 800 pictures, both caught some great fish, and had some good laughs. This was one for the books.
Photos by Shane Rickert and Jake McGlothlin
