Trout Guides

[Al Agnew]

Mary and I just got back from three days of hard fishing on the Missouri River. We and four other couples rented a vacation house on the river, and hired guides for the three days with Matson Rogers, owner of Anglers West in Emigrant MT. Although he's based on the Yellowstone in Paradise Valley, this time of year Matson shifts his base of operations to the Missouri, because as a tailwater river it's nearly always fishable even during the spring runoff.

All of us are experienced anglers, and we have enough boats among us that we wouldn't have had to hire guides. But this was to be a kind of "pampered" trip where we wanted to fish hard while not having to worry about rowing, shuttles, and figuring out the best strategies. Matson and his guides have been on the Missouri every day for the last month or so.

Matson assigned a different guide to each couple each day, so having three guides in three days gave me a good perspective on how different guides approach the problem of putting clients on fish. The Missouri is a simply phenomenal fishery, with vast numbers of rainbows and a decent number of browns (well over 4000 fish per mile according to the surveys, and even that's down from a high a few years ago of 9000 fish per mile!) They average around 17 inches, with very few less than 12 inches. So you'd think that catching them would be easy even without a guide to show you how...and sometimes it is. But the three days showed me again the value of a really good guide.

First day we had Dan, the youngest of the guides, maybe in his late 20's or early 30's. It was a chilly, cloudy day with some wind, after several days of downright cold, wet weather, not many bugs hatching, water clear but not extremely clear. Fishing started out tough for everybody, but tough on the Missouri means a take about every 20 minutes or so instead of every 5 casts or so. All of us were fishing nymphs under indicators, and a big Thingamabobber was the default indicator. Dan was struggling. I was catching fewer fish than the others that were in sight of us. Dan was frustrated, even though I would have been pretty happy about what we WERE catching. Dan asked a couple of the other guides what they were using, but oddly enough, he was still convinced that what we were throwing, which was a little different, should work. Finally Matson came by and told him that he had switched from the Thingamabobber to two small stick-on indicators, because he thought they showed the very subtle takes better. Dan and I still weren't convinced. But after another hour of, as Dan said, "getting our butts handed to us", he finally switched. It worked. We were both surprised. For an hour the fishing improved considerably. Then we started noticing that the takes were getting far less subtle. Bugs were beginning to hatch, and while there was very little surface feeding, the fish were apparently scarfing up the March browns and caddis as they first came off the bottom. And the stickons had their drawbacks, so we went back to the big Things and kept catching fish. And I was learning things, one of which was that, in this situation, the nymphs didn't need to be anywhere near the bottom. We would come to big, deep, slow pools, and key on bubble lines, snaking zones of scum and debri on the surface where the bugs also concentrated, and where the vagaries of current concentrated the emerging bugs...and the fish. The takes there were still subtle, but since the flies were far off the bottom, ANY tiny wiggle or slowdown in the drifting indicator was sure to be a fish.

Dan had probably quickly sized me up as at least somewhat knowing what I was doing, so he didn't do a lot of coaching except to suggest fishing some of the least obvious places. The Missouri is big water and mostly fairly slow, and drop-offs, current breaks, and small depressions in the weedbeds weren't as self-evident as they are on many trout rivers, so it was a definite help to have somebody pointing them out.

I figure we probably caught around 40 fish...which was probably a few less than most of the others did. Dan's boat handling was impeccable, and he was a good guy. I was happy enough at the end of the day.

Second day we had Stew. We floated a different stretch, below the mouth of the Dearborn River, which was coming in muddy, so the river was murkier, with three or so feet of visibility instead of the five feet or so upstream. It was still the same nymphing situation, but with bigger, brighter nymphs. But it was a sunny day, and that made the fishing tougher...except for me at first. Stew put on a Wire Worm, a red worm imitation that was simply red wire around a big, curvy hook, as my top fly, with the standard that everybody else was using as the bottom fly. We started catching fish like crazy, and the other guides, including the consummate pro Matson, were coming up to US and asking what we were doing. Many of the fish were coming on the trailing fly, but the big, bright Wire Worm was apparently attracting their attention to begin with.

I could tell that Stew knew the river even better than Dan did. He was more precise with choosing his line of drift, and more precise with telling me exactly where the flies should be drifting. He did more coaching than Dan had, but in such a way that he made it sound like he knew that I knew that anyway. The first day with Dan, Mary had stayed in the house we rented because the weather was so chilly and she wanted to work on a quilt, but this second day she was along. Mary seldom fly fishes anymore...a bum shoulder makes doing so for more than a few minutes at a time uncomfortable. But she was happy to sit in the sun and read a book, and Stew kept up a running conversation with her when she wasn't reading, making sure she was having as much fun as I was. At one point, I'd caught a really nice fish and looked back at Mary, who was so engrossed in her book that she hadn't seemed to have even noticed. Stew saw me look at her and said she needed some coaching on how to be more enthusiastic when her husband caught a nice fish. Mary played along, and pretty soon they were joking with each fish I caught. Finally Stew said she still needed work on her adjectives, and that from then on, starting with A, she had to come up with an adjective for each letter of the alphabet as I caught fish. By this time we were all laughing like fools, and the other guides and couples were starting to get into the act as they learned of the game. By that time, though, we were nearing the end of the float, and the fishing had slowed. Mary said I needed to get to F, at least. Stew said he couldn't wait to hear her adjective for F. Finally I caught F. Mary said, "F-------- fantastic fish!" We all nearly fell out of the boat.

I learned some subtle nuances of reading water from Stew. His boat handling was as good as Dan's. And he made it an even more fun day than it already was. And he mixed things up a bit, once taking me back into a backwater with almost no current. he put on a big hopper imitation and a tiny dropper fly just 18 inches under it. In that almost dead water, we caught several good fish. All in all, he made it a great day.

Final day, we drew Matson himself. And where Dan had been a little laid back and Stew had been what I'd call casually intense, Matson was...simply intense. Everything was precise. He knew every lie, every perfect line to drift, every tiny dropoff, every "bucket", small depressions behind clumps of weeds. He also knew which ones were best. He immediately pointed out one thing the other two guides never mentioned...that fresh, bright green weed growth was magic. If you were drifting down a line, there could be fish anywhere along it, but there were almost certain to be fish when you came to a patch of bright green on the bottom. And he coached. Boy, did he coach. "Cast 20 feet off the right side." "Put it five feet off the bank." " Hit the top end of that little current seam." "Soft downstream mend as soon as it hits." "Pull it in six feet and let it drift." "See the patch of bright green coming up? Get ready." And every time I casted, he'd say, "Good." If I did anything right, he'd say, "excellent." As the day went along he got more comfortable with my knowledge level, but that just made him more intense, and more apt to explain in fine detail why he was drifting a particular line. If he felt like we hadn't fished a line well enough, he'd work like a dog to row back upstream to fish it again.

It seemed that, other than when he was rowing across the river to a different drift line, or rowing through a dead water pool, I had no chance to ever look up from the indicator. The only time we actually slacked off on the intensity was when we stopped to watch a bighorn ram scampering up a near-vertical cliff face. We all watched in awe for about a minute, and then Matson said, "Okay, cast left side, 15 feet." And it was back to concentrating.

And we needed all that intensity because it was a tough day, very bright sun, warm, absolutely no insect activity. Matson's idea of a change of pace was, just as the wind came up and started blowing hard upstream, to see if we could find any fish along this bank that were looking for terrestials being blown into the water, which meant precision casts within inches of the bank with a tiny ant imitation dry. Ever try doing that in a 20 mph upstream wind? It didn't result in any fish, but it was a different kind of intense fishing, anyway.

Still, Matson kept Mary in the game, as well, with plenty of conversation in between the terse coaching sentences to me. He continued the alphabet game, and we made it all the way through the alphabet and up to E on the second go-round. 31 fish on a tough day.

The other two guides were excellent boat handlers. I was always in good position to fish. But Matson was in a class by himself. He could scoot that big drift boat across the river with some rowing strokes I'd never seen before and which I can't wait to try myself. But more importantly, he made so many subtle positioning changes that made a good drift of my flies perfect. He actually adjusted my drifts with boat positioning. All good guides do this to some extent, but he was a master at it, and I was aware enough to note how he did it.

At the end of the day, Mary asked me if I was okay with how intense Matson was, and how much he coached me. She knows me well, and knows that I often don't take coaching all that well in anything I think I know how to do. But I told her that I loved it, that it was a graduate course in trout fishing and in fishing the Missouri River. I wouldn't want a steady diet of it, though...sometimes I want to relax a bit.

I've had quite a few guides over the years. Most were pretty good, some were excellent, a few were abysmal. But this trip reminded me of how valuable a truly expert guide can be. I had three of them in three days, and I am sure that my fly fishing just improved several percentage points, and that's worth the price of admission.

[hoglaw]

Great read Al.

[Johnsfolly]

Al - great post!