Sacrilege!

[Al Agnew]

So I'll be honest...I do a lot of fly fishing out here in Montana, but I STILL don't love fly fishing as much as I do fishing for stream bass with a good baitcasting rod and reel.  When I'm in Missouri, I very seldom use a fly rod.  I find the worship of fly fishing that is characteristic of so many fly fishermen slightly amusing.  But when in Rome do as the Romans do.  When in Montana, you have to fly fish.

I'll also be the first to admit that I'm not as good with a fly rod as I am with a baitcast rod.  I'm good enough to hold my own with most anglers, but I have friends out here who are considerably better than I am at casting, handling complex currents and getting good drifts, fine-tuning presentations.  Maybe that's why I don't love it as much...I still have plenty of improvement to accomplish, and I'm just not into it enough to put in the effort to get a lot better than I am.  So I'm happy to catch enough trout to feel like I'm doing it more or less right.

All of this is leading up to the reason why, this afternoon, I gathered up one of the two baitcast outfits I keep out here, and found a couple Lucky Craft Pointer jerkbaits, and carried them down to the Yellowstone at the house along with a couple fly rods and my little Water Master raft.  I'd been swearing to try this for years, but again being honest, I was afraid I'd feel a little embarrassed if some of the guides I know and their clients came by and saw me chucking hardware. 

It's about 3.5 miles from our house to the next access on the Yellowstone, and I got on the water about 2 PM.  It was a gorgeous day, as almost all of September and October so far has been out here.  Usually we get one good snow in September.  This fall, so far, we've had NO precipitation, just mostly sunny, sometimes smoky, days with highs in the 70s and low 80s and lows in the 40s--we've only had two days where there was frost on the grass.  When I put the little raft in, it was 83 degrees on the temperature sensor in the house, and--a little unusual--no wind.  Not exactly weather conducive to catching trout, however.

There were two boats with guides and their clients within sight as I pushed off, and I have to admit that I didn't immediately pick up the baitcaster.  I stopped at the first decent "riffle corner", what we call the eddylines at the bottom of riffles, and started drifting my go-to nymph setup, a simple size 14 bead head hare's ear and a small soft hackle on the dropper.  And immediately caught a 12 inch and then a 17 inch rainbow.  The guides passed me, but I kept fishing the nymphs because they were working, though the next couple fish I caught were big whitefish.  But once they were out of sight, and I had drifted down into slower, deeper water along some rip rap banks, I started casting the Pointer.  Took quite a few casts, but then I hooked a good fish, a 19 inch brown.  And then a 17 inch cutthroat.  And a 16 inch rainbow.  I was drifting along, just fishing deep banks like I would smallmouth fishing.  There was a side channel swinging off to the right, with a long rip rap bank along it, barely enough water to float over the riffle entering it.  A guy in a whitewater kayak towing a big dry bag behind it on a tether (a seriously weird setup) had just passed me and gone down that side channel, but I decided that since he wasn't fishing he wouldn't bother the fish much, and on a river that gets as much pounding as the Yellowstone, taking the "road" less traveled often pays off.  So I took the channel. And that was exactly when the first gust of wind hit.  The wind just came up all of a sudden, and it was instantly blowing 20 miles an hour. 

I was drifting down the rip rap, slow current, fishing just as I would for smallmouth, casting the jerkbait, reeling it a couple cranks, pausing it, reeling another couple cranks, casting at about a 45 degree angle in front of me, controlling the Water Master in the wind, which was quartering at my back, with my swim fins.  And the fish took it just like a smallmouth.  But I saw it turn its side, and it was considerably longer than any smallmouth.  (And by the way, there have been a couple smallmouth caught in this section of the Yellowstone in recent years, and the fish and game people are scared to death of smallmouth in trout water and have put on a mandatory kill regulation on smallmouth here.)  In fact, the fish looked so long that at first I thought, "geez, could it be a pike?"  Pike have been caught in trout water in Montana now and then.  Heck, if there were any bull trout in the Yellowstone I would have jumped to that conclusion.  Nope, it was a HUGE rainbow!  I battled that fish for a good five minutes, maybe more, working myself over to the gravelly bank on the other side, getting the net ready, pumping the rod to get the fish close enough, the trout rolling on the surface and then making runs back toward deeper water.  And JUST as it was within reach of the net (which I'm not sure it would have fit into), it gave one more head shake, and the hooks pulled out.

I think I've caught enough big trout to be able to make a decent guess as to size of that fish, and I certainly got some good looks at it.  I also think the largest trout I've ever caught on the Yellowstone was 24 inches.  This fish was easily 28 inches, and I'm pretty sure it would have made 30 inches.  I've never seen a trout this big on the Yellowstone.  It was definitely significantly bigger than any trout I'd ever hooked anywhere but up in Alaska.  It had a big hooked jaw that was open as wide as my hand is long. It was just a fish that I simply never expected to hook, and especially not in that particular spot, small side channel, very sluggish current, right up against that rip rap.

I fished the jerkbait a while longer, but Mary was scheduled to come pick me up at 5:30, and I still had two miles to go, and the wind was really aggravating.  So I stopped in one more good riffle corner and caught several 10-14 inch rainbows and a couple more whitefish on the nymphs, and then rowed the rest of the way to the take-out.

To heck with the looks I'll get...I'm gonna fish that baitcaster some more!

[Quillback]

Wow, that's a huge trout!  I would guess those fish have not seen a lot of jerk baits, you could be in for some great fishing.

[fishinwrench]

I'm going to say that it's not the sacrilege of failing to use a fly rod that might make the locals frown...... It's the using of a fistful of treble hooks. 😅 

Especially where flossing with pegged beads is considered unsportsmanlike also.

[Phil Lilley]

The shame of it all

Awesome!

[Quillback]

Turn the tables on them, when you're fishing your bait caster stuff and some fly fishermen drift by, give them "the look", before they give it to you.  😃

[tjm]

I've probably caught more stream bass on my fly rod than I have trout especially over the past 30 years, before that there weren't many stream bass where I lived. I know I've caught all my large  smallmouth on flies. I prefer the fly rod for a few reasons, not least because I'm far too lazy to use a reel that has to be cranked on every cast. But then I know that some folks like to increase the difficulty of any undertaking, I got whupped enough times as a kid for doing things the easy way to ever forget that. 

[WestCentralFisher]

That's a heck of a fish. 

Here's a truth I've found: larger trout behave an awful lot like bass in many waters, and you can fish for them with the same techniques you use for smallmouth bass with great success. A rebel craw is probably my favorite lure for stream resident trout in Missouri, with the exception of the smallest of the wild trout creeks where it's hard to run a crankbait. I don't do anything different than when I'm smallmouth fishing, except I'm more likely to target faster water a little more. You catch fewer trout than you would on a little spinner or marabou jig or a here's ear nymph, but the ones you catch are larger by about 20-40% on average. And if you're anywhere but the very coldest, most spring-fed section of the river, you'll likely make those lost numbers up with smallmouth bass and goggle-eye.

On that note, I also find that on spring-fed rivers in Missouri, the best places to catch big trout are often the marginal sections. The lower parts of the managed sections where yes, technically you can trout fish, but if you're floating you're probably switching primarily to smallmouth tackle by that point in the day. Sometimes even the mile or two below trout management areas can produce big trout semi-reliably, though at that point you are gonna need some luck or a lot of local knowledge to succeed. Trout will hide in deep holes in those sections, the exact places you target for big smallmouth.

I don't think these sections actually have more big trout than the better water upstream. I think there are just fewer 12-14 inch stocked rainbows that are so eager to hit anything that you can't get past them to anything bigger, even with methods intended for bigger trout.

Yesterday I caught my biggest brown of the year that way while fishing for smallmouth on the Niangua. In that case, I spotted him, and actually switched to more trout centric methods, which were not effective and drew no interest. Tied the rebel craw back on, hit like a freight train. Had a similar situation on the Current with a smaller but still real nice brown a couple weeks back. 

[Kayser]

Now imagine the looks if you're trying to get a fish for dinner, and break out a nightcrawler. The horror!

The fish in that river see very few large baits presented well, and respond as you would expect a large predator to. October is a fun month. 😉

[jdmidwest]

They will probably burn you out of your house you ole Missouri Hillbilly...

Funny thing, my buddy was wanting to catch a brown on the White River this summer on a company sponsored guide trip.  He is not a bait fisher and is used to spin casting lures to trout.  But the guide was hung over and he "forgot" to thaw out his shad stash.  So, he was lost, used to taking out baitfishers and did not help my buddy any.  Kept him tossing bait to the rainbow stockers for entertainment.  Even made fun of the flyfishing guides going by.

Trout fishing on spin gear and lures can be very rewarding.  Much like casting the long  rod and flies.  I prefer spin gear when floating.  Flyrods are best from a standing position anymore for me.