Beautiful Morning on the River

The weather is heating up and so is the fishing! Although the action was a bit slow for us in the beginning it was a promising sign of things to come. I took our friends Dan and Chris with me east of town in the hopes to get on an evening caddis bite on Saturday evening. As is usually the case in our state my efforts were trumped by a 15mph wind leading to some not so effective dry fly fishing conditions. Chris did miss a massive strike that created a wake with his line shortly before stealing his fly... Im calling carp on this one. Saturday morning we woke to much more favorable conditions with no wind and air temperatures in the upper 50s. After some coffee and a short drive to the west side of town we began fishing. Within 15 minutes the first fish was in the net, a cute little 12" hatchery rainbow, and a few minutes after that Chris landed a strong 16" Whitefish. We then made our way to another spot in town that I have been meaning to try. Immediately Chris caught another small rainbow followed by Dan losing 2 fish(which is usually the case because he concentrates most of his efforts on artistic photography instead of fishing but we'll save that for another post). Shortly after art-boy lost his 2 fish i hooked into a very nice brown in the 20-22" range. After a 2 minute fight and some very strong runs the hook worked its way out and i was subsequently a very sad boy. We did try one other spot but hunger got the best of us and it was off to Jimmy Johns. As far as bugs go it looks like most of the Green Drakes on this side of the state line have hatched during the high water period but you should still find some good GD dry action in the upper sections of the river. I was seeing a ton of Little Yellow Stone casings on the rocks so I imagine the evenings are a good mix of LYS and Caddis. Our fish came on a variety of flies including a Hotwire Prince nymph, zebra midge and Burkes Bottom Rollers. See you out there this weekend.