A couple weeks ago, Jake and I headed over to the Beaverhead River just outside of Dillon, MT. I’ve fished this water a couple of times now; yet Jake had never fished the famous “Beav”. Jake was able to track down a small one man raft and I had my 8′ pontoon boat. A float was on!
We decided on floating from The Dam to High Bridge. This would offer a short float and allow us to cover all the runs thoroughly since fishing out of a one man boat is typically out of the question.
4:30am was our projected time to leave Bozeman and be able to make it to the river before all the guide traffic showed up (that rolled around quite quickly!). A quick stop at Frontier Anglers in Dillon and we were back on I-90 headed to the Dam well ahead of the guide boats.
Now, if you’ve never been to the Beaverhead, it is a unique river and I’m not sure if anything else quite like it exists. Think of a freestone river, 20-30 feet wide, with undercut banks heavily brushed on each side. Now make it a tailwater with gin clear water, weedy bottoms, and picky fish that can be BIG. Techy nymphing and long leader dry fly fishing is usually the name of the game over here. This is what we wanted!
Jake picked a fish up right off the bat which, of course, made us think that the entire day was going to be lights out. And…. that was not the case. We struggled the rest of the day to catch any fish. Lighter tippet, smaller flies, small indicators, etc. etc. I finally caught a 12″ brown half way through the day. At least we weren’t skunked.
One of my favorite sections of the river is right before the High Bridge take out. It’s a long, deep slick and we could see heads poking up the entire length of it. We decided to drop anchor in the middle of the river and slowly work our way down, casting to risers as we went. It didn’t disappoint. We both started making somewhat calculated casts to each fish and they eagerly ate a well presented dry. We both hooked a couple really nice, healthy browns but weren’t able to land many. Somehow, I brought one to hand. Being in a one man boat, anchored in a river, without a net, causes some problems when you have fish hooked on a size 16 dry. Lesson learned…..
We took the boats out at High Bridge just a couple hundred yards further downstream, packed up and started the two hour drive back to Bozeman. With no radio in Jake’s car and the tie down straps making a hellish screeching noise the entire way home, it felt good to pull up to the garage and stop the car!
