The Right Amount Of Lead

[Al Agnew]

I was able to head north from Livingston and fish the Missouri River for the first time for two days last week. My friend Charlie fishes the Missouri a lot, and knows the area around Craig and Wolf Creek very well, so when he and his wife Cis invited me along I jumped at the chance.

There wasn't much of anything happening as far as hatches, just a few midges and a short period of sparse Baetis. So it was strictly a nymphing trip; I tried streamers for a while with only a few half-hearted bumps to show for it. The Missouri is a tailwater river that's a lot like a big spring creek, with clear water and lots of vegetation on the bottom. The first thing that Charlie told me was that if you couldn't see the bottom you wouldn't catch fish. They simply didn't seem to hold in water deeper than four feet or so. Unlike Yellowstone River fish, they didn't like heavy current, either. At the first place we stopped after putting in the drift boat, I spent too much time fishing too deep. At the second spot, I tried some fast, riffly water that would be great on the Yellowstone, and caught nothing while Charlie and Cis were catching big, beautiful rainbows in the slower water. Once I accepted Charlie's advice on where the fish were holding, I started catching those rainbows as well. Compared to the Yellowstone, the fishing was a whole lot easier and the fish averaged a lot bigger on the Missouri. Almost every fish we caught was between 17 and 20 inches, and we caught a bunch of them.

But...the whole first day, I was catching fewer fish than Cis and Charlie. Oh, I was catching enough to keep me happy, but I started watching Charlie closely to see how he was doing it. Part of it was that he simply knew the water so well. The wind was blowing hard and it was mostly overcast, so I couldn't really see the bottom well where we were fishing, even though it was shallow. Another part of it was that I was trying a few different flies. Charlie's fly of choice was a Green Machine, size 16 or 18, and a Spring Creek Scud. I had bought a few of the scuds at the fly shop in Wolf Creek that morning, but they were out of Green Machines. Charlie gave me a couple of his, but I lost them fairly quickly, and didn't want to bug him for more, so I kept trying various nymphs that looked a little like the Green Machine, and tried some of my usual scud patterns as well. They simply didn't seem to produce nearly as well that first day, though.

I obtained a half dozen Green Machines from a different fly shop the morning of the second day. But even so, the day started out with Charlie again outfishing me significantly.

We were stopped at a good run along a steep, grassy bank when the wind temporarily died enough that I could see the bottom where I was drifting my nymphs perfectly. I noticed, really for the first time, that there was bright green vegetation that ran parallel to the current, as I already knew, but there were also clumps of darker vegetation that lay in ridges perpendicular to the current, with slightly deeper pockets just below them. Those deeper pockets were where the trout were holding. And I finally went against Charlie's other piece of advice to fish those pockets.

The first thing he'd told me as we were rigging up the first day was to use one BB size split shot to get the flies down. My usual is two BB size shot in the kind of current we were fishing, but I figured that he knew what he was talking about, and also figured that using a little less weight in that vegetation made sense, because you wouldn't want the weight to keep sinking into the salad, but ticking the top of it. So that's what I'd used up until I saw those pockets. I realized that I needed to get the flies down and into the deeper pockets, and even though they were only 6-10 inches deeper than the clumps of vegetation, the flies needed to drop quickly over the lip of the drop-off.

So I put on another split shot, and caught a 20 incher the first cast. And I proceeded to catch one or two fish at every pocket I came to wading slowly down that run. It was like magic, catching fish at the rate of one every five minutes or so, where before I would have figured on catching one or two in total down that 50 yard stretch of bank. The extra weight made all the difference. For the rest of the day, I actually caught more fish every time we stopped than did Charlie. Yep, there were places where it was too much weight and the weight kept hanging in the weeds. But if I could actually see the drop-offs and cast so that I had the sink rate timed to where it would reach the bottom just as it neared the lip, I caught fish. And just blind casting when the wind came back up again, I still caught fish whenever I got good drifts.

The Missouri is a spectacular fishery. Between the three of us, we probably caught 60 or more trout both days, and hooked and lost close to that many more, and as I noted, they were almost all thick-bodied fish better than 17 inches that leapt spectacularly when they felt the hook. I can only remember catching two or three that were well under 17 inches, and even they were 13 inches or so. I fell in love with the Missouri!

[Gavin]

Nice report. Weight matters. Change it for every run if need be.