Land of the Giants.
The very name conjures up visions of big fish, and lots of them. It’s a pretty well known place, hence the reason I’m naming it on here. A lot of the places I go I really don’t want people to know about. This one is a little different since it’s so popular. It’s a beautiful stretch of river, winding it’s slow way through a canyon worn deep by the ravages of time. I’ve been meaning to make it up there for quite some time and finally made it happen last week.
Steve and I headed out at a reasonable hour. That’s one really nice thing about winter fishing; being able to sleep in and get a leisurely start to the morning. There isn’t much rush to get there at sun up. You can take your sweet time.
We were heading to this particular place for a couple of reasons. Reason one is that is generally fishes quite well in the winter time. And reason two is that it is perfect water for throwing the Spey. Which is exactly what we both planned to do most of the day. There is just something about the rhythm of Spey casting that is so easy to get lost in… And I have a streamer box full of swing flies I haven’t yet tried out.
It’s been a damned unusually warm and sunny few weeks of weather in Montana. It may piss the skiers off, but man is it nice for the anglers. Any time you can fish in a lighter jacket, in the sun, in the middle of January is a blessing. While I could bore you with a couple of paragraphs about how the fishing was, I’ll cut right to the chase: SLOW. Damned slow. We swung flies pretty much all day and didn’t get a bump. According to a couple of locals we bumped into, the fishing was great earlier in the week but had really slowed down for everyone by the time we got there.
But oh well, that’s fishing in January for you. You have to take the good with the bad. On the walk out, we stopped to nymph a nice deep pool right below the dam. Some nasty ass hatchery mutant quickly gobbled up my egg sucking laser worm (a Pink egg sucking laser worm no less) and saved the skunk. Honestly I would have been fine with not catching anything, but feeling the tug on the end of the line is nice after a long day of nothing.
It wasn’t quite as good as I had hoped, but I got everything out of that day that I wanted to. You fish for long enough, you realize that actually catching fish is almost secondary, especially in the wintertime. It’s everything else that makes the days worthwhile and keeps us coming back for more.
