Smallmouth Roots

[Al Agnew]

I didn't start flyfishing for trout seriously until 1996, the first year I went to Montana. I grew up fishing aggressively for smallmouth with fast-moving lures. So even now, fishing for trout, I often go back to my roots.

It's been a tough summer in Montana. The remodel from hell, and painting for a one man show took up so much time when I was out here earlier that I only got in two short days of fishing the whole time. Now that we're back out here for a bit and the remodel is mostly finished, I was really planning on doing more fishing. But things kept coming up. I slipped off to the river one evening for a couple hours, and caught a 19 inch brown right next to the house, but yesterday I was bound and determined to do a Yellowstone float. Well, I awoke yesterday morning to a chocolate river. The day before, huge thunderstorms had brewed up and dumped a whole lot of rain, probably on Sixmile Creek, where there had been major fires last year. That's been happening a lot; we've had a wet summer out here and Sixmile has been dumping mud into the river with every hard rain.

So I took a chance and drove over to the Boulder River, a 45 minute run, in hopes it would be clear. It wasn't. I drove up the valley, thinking maybe the West Boulder was coming in muddy and the main Boulder would be clear above it. No such luck. So I cut back across the Swingley Road with one last chance, the Shields.

The Shields River drains the Crazy Mountains. Actually the range was once called the Crazy Woman Mountains. It seems that an early settler and his wife built a cabin in the Crazies at the very beginning of the European settlement period. He died soon after building the place, but his wife refused to leave it and lived there for many years. The Indians pretty much left her alone because they considered her to be deranged. Hence the name Crazy Woman Mountains.

The Crazies are a high, rugged mountain range that is isolated from any other high mountains. It sits like a big round lump in the middle of rolling sagebrush country, with no roads going far into it, so it's wild and remote. Right now, a bowhunter has been lost in the Crazies for going on ten days, and the search for him will go on until the end of this weekend, though there is not much hope he's still alive, since there has been a lot of rain and snow in the mountains since he disappeared and he was not equipped to stay overnight.

The Shields is a fairly long river, but doesn't carry a whole lot of water. Where it emerges from the Crazies it's a typical mountain stream, but it runs for many miles down a wide valley before entering the Yellowstone just a few miles downstream from our house, so it has a lot of time to warm up in the summer. It still holds trout all the way to the Yellowstone, but it gets warm enough that they get some stress, and it's not known as a great fishing river down here. But it's close by and there's a nice public access on it just a few miles from the confluence. I tend to try fishing it a few times every year, avoiding it during the heat of the summer, because not only is it warm, but the mosquitoes are about as bad along it as anywhere out here I've tried to fish.

It's a wadeable stream, flowing anywhere from 75 to 300 cfs in normal late summer and autumn stages, and it looks a lot like an Ozark stream, with fast riffles and mostly short pools with a gravel bottom. It was flowing more strongly than usual, but was clear when I walked down to it from the access. I tied on a two nymph rig, kind of the default thing to do when nothing seems to be rising, and started working my way upstream. Three pools and runs later, I had one 6 inch brown trout to show for my efforts.

It's still hopper season here, though cool weather has thinned the grasshoppers somewhat. I switched to a hopper/dropper rig, with a small Hare's Ear nymph off the hopper. Nothing. I switched back to the two nymph rig. By the time I'd gone two miles up the river, I still had caught only that one tiny brown, and the day was beginning to wane.

As I started back down, I tied on a streamer, one of my crosscut rabbit bodied, red squirrel tailed concoctions. What the heck, if I'm not catching fish, I might as well fish something aggressively that I enjoy just casting and working. And I much p refer to fish streamers downstream anyway.

On the third cast I got a hard strike that turned out to be a 12 inch brown. Two casts later, another strike that missed. Suddenly the river that had seemed dead was alive. Lots of fish were striking a little short, but I was getting steady action. Most were 10-12 inchers, but that was a whole lot better than before. Places that I had combed with the nymph rig with absolutely nothing happening were now producing browns.

As I neared the access, I came to the first of two pools that I had high hopes for. I like slow, flat pools for streamer fishing, and most of the pools I'd been fishing were still short and with the higher than normal water were fairly fast all the way through. But this one was a bit wider and slower. I got two nice swings and misses, then a 13 inch brown, and near the tail of the pool where it began to shallow and the current just started to pick up, a long, lean 17 incher. I netted it, intending to photograph it before releasing it, but before I could get out the camera it flopped out of the net and off the streamer and swam away.

The next pool I was looking forward to fishing was right at the access. In fact, it starts at the access and runs downstream for a hundred yards or so. You'd think that it would be fished out, but I knew it was one of the longer pools on this whole stretch and held some fish. "Some fish" may be an understatement. I got at least a dozen strikes in it, caught 7 browns, and finished off with the best fish of the day, an 18 inch hook-jawed male that was beginning to color up in preparation for spawning. Again, no pictures...this one did exactly the same thing the other picture worthy fish did.

I've always thought brown trout were a lot like smallmouth in the way they feed and utilize cover, so going back to my smallmouth roots seems to work with them (and sometimes with rainbows as well). I love fishing streamers. They don't always work, but I almost always give them a chance. This time it paid off.

[Guest]

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[fishinwrench]

Al, I'm really surprised that you don't flyfish for smallies more....or maybe you do and just don't talk about it.

Is it because you don't like to get out of the canoe ?

[Greasy B]

Great story, thanks. When I'm mixing hardware with software I also tend to focus on the similarities.

[Al Agnew]

Al, I'm really surprised that you don't flyfish for smallies more....or maybe you do and just don't talk about it.

Is it because you don't like to get out of the canoe ?

You know, part of it is because I don't like to get out of the canoe, but part of it is simply that I enjoy fishing for smallies the way I've always fished for them. I love fly fishing, but to me there's just something about making accurate casts and working fast moving lures when it comes to smallmouth. I really wished I had brought a fly rod along on my Minnesota trip, though; the situation with the places where the fish were would have been perfect for fishing with the fly rod.

[fishinwrench]

Totally understandable. I go through phases, I'll gear fish for awhile then switch back the flyrod. Back & forth. But one thing I never do is take both on the same trip.

I do get a bigger kick out of a day with the fly gear though, and ripping streamers like you were referring to is a real good way to get some savage strikes from smallies.

[Mark]

Please explain to a novice what exactly is a streamer?

[Al Agnew]

Mark, there are basically three kinds of flies that you fish for trout...dry flies, which float on the surface and imitate the emergent phase of some aquatic insect, or terrestrial insects that fall into the water. Nymphs, which sink and are meant to be fished below the surface or near the bottom and which imitate underwater insects, etc. And streamers. Streamers are generally tied on a long shanked hook, have a long, slim profile, are fished under the surface or near the bottom, and mostly imitate small fish, though they can also be loose imitations of crayfish, leeches, or other critters. Another difference between streamers and nymphs is that streamers are usually fished by making them move with twitches or strips of the line, while nymphs are usually fished on a dead drift, attempting to make them move only at the speed of the current. It's kinda like you're making nymphs look dead, and streamers look alive.

Of course, you can fish streamers with a dead drift, and you can manipulate nymphs and dries. but in general streamers are long, slender flies that are fished by stripping and twitching, nymphs are compact flies fished by dead drifting.

[fishinwrench]

Streamer fishing (and tying) took a huge leap forward when we learned how to manipulate water pressure.

Flies designed with bulky heads and soggy unbalanced tails have an action that no hard bait or plastic can match.

[David Unnerstall]

Mark! Stop right now. This fly-fishing stuff is dangerous. Once you get started you can't go back. My late father-in-law gave me his fly fishing gear before he passed away. I just wanted to get a feel for it. We fished the NFOW River last fall and I was OK but this year Brian Wise took us in his drift boat and I am not the same. The next week I picked up a spinning rod to fish my pond and it was so .......insufficient.