Some photos from the past two weeks while out winter fly fishing and windshield shots while driving to rivers…temperatures cool, river traffic low, trout kind of sleepy, prairie towns also sleepy.
favorite pic
main street, prairie town
smiling barn
rainbow trout ( had been caught before)
foothill-prairie town
ice on fly rod guides
bow river
bow river brown trout, only tail on ice
sculpture
prairie town
The Winter Solstice is just around the corner and I’m still swinging flies and catching trout. I purchased a two-handed switch rod and have been practicing Spey casting the last couple of weekends. It’s going to be my winter project. The casting movement is certainly much easier on the shoulder especially when fishing a big wide open windy river.
sw alberta brown trout
I was hoping to get away to somewhere exotic like Patagonia (check out First Cast Fly Fishing) or NZ this winter for some dry fly angling but I don’t think that I’ll get the time needed for a DIY trip. So, swinging flies it is.
sw alberta tailwater river
All I need is the temperature to be somewhere around zero and it’s quite comfortable out there, even with the sun just barely arcing above the horizon. From noon until 4:30 works well. The fish seem opportunistic then. I keep the menu real simple: a small leech like pattern (black, dark brown or olive) with black rubber legs. Maybe it’s the wiggle; maybe not.
Three weeks ago some trout were feeding in the riffles and hanging out in shallow drop offs. They were quite active. Lately most have been down deeper. I hauled one up the other day in cold weather and it had mittens on its fins.
brown trout
Since I’m not heading to the southern hemisphere I’ve been researching winter steelhead opportunities. There is an intriguing river ten hours from my home. It’s a bit of a hike but maybe I’ll get a chance to put a big bend in the two-hander. In the meantime I’ll keep practicing my technique.
rainbow trout
road home to the rockies
“We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails”.
Dolly Parton
There was a wind warning today. I saw part of my neighbour’s eaves trough tumble down the road. At least I think it was his? I should check mine!
On the eastern slopes of the divide in SW Alberta it’s always windy and if you don’t fish in the wind, well, you’re not going to get out very often. So I decided to go and just deal with it. I’d be casting a streamer and figured if it got real bad I’d just flip the fly and feed line or roll cast a lot. My plan was to fish a section of the river that is braided so I’d could find some protective areas behind islands and gravel bars.
late november brown trout
If there is anything good about the wind around here, it’s generally predictable: easterly. The other good thing is that in the summer time it blows terrestrials (grasshoppers, beetles, etc.) into the water. None of that today as we have transitioned to winter.
rainbow trout
I thought that if things became unbearable out there I would pretend I had travelled a long, long way to the Rio Gallegos in southern Patagonia where sea run brown trout and gale force winds rule the river, and you deal with it by tugging down on your Beret and just keep casting! My shoulder still aches. I’m well past the 100 pitch mark in my 9 inning angling career.
rainbow trout
I caught several Rainbow trout and coincidently, one Brown (not sea run but resident), which was the prize of the day. I was standing on the bank four feet above the water and swung my fly through a fairly shallow side channel with an even flow. As the fly tightened to the bank a brown trout glided out from some wood structure and nabbed it. I saw the whole thing from my elevated position. It made the day. I fished until dusk and then headed home guided by the North Star, or was that the Southern Cross?
sw alberta brown trout
https://troutondries.wordpress.com/wp-admin/link-manager.php
I fished my local tailwater river this past Sunday hoping to extend the season…and I did. It was winter like but sunny and that makes all the difference. The wind died down in the afternoon and that made things almost pleasant.
The bugs are definitely gone. Long gone. I didn’t even see a midge so I casted a streamer with a 6wt and a polyleader. I managed several fish and a few good ones in the afternoon when the weather was best. I got them on a low slow swing…sweet chariot. I was hoping to connect with a Brown trout but only caught Rainbows…not a bad consolation. I’ll take that deal any day.
raptor in distance, probably an eagle
sw alberta rainbow trout
Here are a few pictures while fishing near what some people call the “Cliffs of Doom”. They remind me more of the “Cliffs of Dover”; however, more tan in color than white. From river level to the top is at least 200 ft.
sw alberta rainbow trout
I didn’t know how many days of fly fishing I’d get before the Polar Vortex caught up to me. Maybe one or two? I was heading south and it was on my tail. The weather report said it was big and ominous. From all the TV and Radio chatter it sounded like the thing had teeth and was chomping its way south. I was glad to be ahead of it. I crossed the border at Sunburst with the Sweet Grass Hills to the east. Then it was two hours of mostly flat, featureless terrain with absolutely no trees. The only sign of life and movement was the constant 80km wind blasting the prairie grass, Oil Jacks pumping away in the distance, and some Pronghorn Antelope on the run. Apparently they had also heard about the incoming vortex.
A short while later I knew I was nearing Oilmont. I could smell the gas. It always smells of gas there even when the wind is at gale force. Your lungs tell you that what you’re breathing isn’t good for you. From sweet grass to sour gas all in thirty minutes. I speed up, hold my breath and wonder about the health of the locals. That’s if anyone is alive out there. I always think that if I did meet someone from Oilmont he’d look something like Daniel Day Lewis in the movie: There Will be Blood; and he’d be clenching a bowling pin.
rainbow trout
Past Oilmont I saw more Pronghorn. They are amazing creatures. It seems they can live where nothing else can. They range from Baja and Sonora Mexico where they wear sombreros all the way into southern Alberta and Saskatchewan where they look smart in their white cowboy hats. They really look like they belong in Africa, somewhere out on the Serengeti. I’ve read they can take intense heat and cold, and can survive where there is almost no water. They are the second fastest land animal. Only the Cheetah stands higher on the podium in a sprint. Stretch out the race a bit and the Pronghorn takes gold…speed plus endurance.
After a couple of hours crossing the flats it always feels good to arrive in the town of Great Falls. Seeing trees and buildings after the “big void” is always comforting. I’m always flabbergasted by the number of gambling establishments in this town. It seems every corner on the main commercial strip has a couple of VLT joints. They are attached to gas stations, convenience stores and motels. They have names like Cart Wheel casino, casino Emerald City, Lucky Lil’s and Diamond Lil’s. All of the windows in these establishments, if they have windows, are darkly tinted and have neon signs. The whole scene kind of looks secretive and seedy. And it always seems there are a dozen pick-up trucks parked outside at all times of the day; people hunched over the glowing machines from morning until night. You just know a lot of kids in the region are going to school without lunch money.
missouri river rainbow trout
On the south side of Great Falls I always stop at a Barnes and Noble (book store). It has big comfortable couches and is a great place to grab a coffee (in-house Starbucks) and a magazine after four and one half hours on the road. I purchased The Drake fly fishing magazine which sold as advertised for “5 bucks (no tax), $10.00 for bait fisherman”. After a quick break it’s just a 30 minute drive to the town of Craig, my angling destination.
Missouri river rainbow
On this trip, Craig was a ghost town. Everyone had cleared out. Obviously they had heard a polar vortex was coming. Either that or they had migrated west to fish for Steelhead. The local restaurant was closed. Papa’s Burritos was boarded up. There were a couple of anglers walking around and one stray dog but that’s about it. Two of the three fly shops were open, but empty…no customers, well, except me. It’s a gamble fishing here this late in the season. Everything is weather dependent and November can be a dicey month.
missouri river rainbow
The high wind made dry-fly angling real challenging. There were tumble weeds rolling in the streets and some even rotating in the river. I managed most of my fish on dries and a few on streamers when the wind completely took over. Someone once told me that, “The wind around here has issues”. How true.
tumble weed
tumble weed
There were some midges in the morning and tiny olives in the afternoon. There were no large olives this year. I spent most of my time hunting for calm water. I generally had to focus on a 2 or 3 foot wide section of placid water that often existed next to the shoreline/bank. That’s where fish could be spotted rising when there was a bit of a hatch. The rest of the river was often just too choppy. Every once in a while things would calm down and the river briefly became mirror-like and some fish would rise further out. These moments, however, were rare and fleeting. Angling time was also fleeting. Not much daylight at this time of year.
I fooled my best fish, a brown trout, and the only one of the trip, on a beetle. Success on a terrestrial pattern in the second week of November! Unfortunately I didn’t get a picture of the brown. As I was getting set up to “click, click” he bolted to deep water. He was a good one: fall colors and a hooked jaw. The fish of the trip. I did manage some nice rainbows, many of them sippers. If there are some bugs around and you make a commitment to patiently watch the water in the right spots, you’ll find trout rising on the Missouri. Unlike Lil’s it’s a sure bet.
cold front arrived
I got two days in before the polar vortex (cold air) hit. The morning after it was calm and I fished for a few hours and managed to catch a trout in sub-zero (C) weather on a midge dry. Then it was time to head home on the icy roads.
side channel
“It’s down there. Down there somewhere in that coulee. The mother of all trout. A brand new Sage One rod for the first person who spots it. You spot it and I’ll catch it. I’ve got this cricket on my line. A black cricket. Look at those spindly rubber legs. It will be irresistible to the one with the big fins. It will fool him. I know it will fool him. It has fooled me. Come on let’s go way down into the coulee. It’s not as far as it looks. A Sage One. Hear that! A Sage One for the first person who spots him. I’ll flick a cricket at big fins. Well see what he says about that. I’ll flick a cricket with a shiny belly. I just have to get the right drift. It’s all about the right drift. If I get the right drift then all hell will break loose.”
(fiction)
morning sun burst
rainbow trout on dry fly
water blur
rainbow trout on dry fly
I’ve had my share of difficulty in past weeks keeping the camera lens clear of water beads (splashy fish); thus the blur effect.
In the About page of my blog I describe how I’m drawn to the rivers in the parched, windswept land of the high plains on the eastern side of the continental divide. Here are some pictures of the landscape I find so captivating, and where I often find myself hiking and sight fishing for wild trout with dries. The “catching” is always important but it is also about the sky, the serpentine water, the light and shadows, the wind, and the texture of the land. Places have an impact on us. Some places more than others. When you find a place that keeps calling you, you should go there. You go and spend the day, a complete day, where you get to watch the sun travel from one shoulder of the earth to the other. And you breathe it all in and it changes you. Maybe just a little. Maybe just temporarily. But it does change you. And at the end of the day when you retrace your steps home and slowly awaken from the spell of the place, you find yourself saying, “I want to go back”.
It’s the middle of winter but the days are noticeably longer. I’m actually able to put in some time on the nearby trails after work, snowshoeing for an hour before it gets dark. More daylight feels good.
Here are some summertime pictures of rainbow trout. All were caught sight fishing with dry flies: mayflies and small terrestrial. The two rivers I frequently fished don’t have high concentrations of trout so you have to walk a lot and search when the light conditions are right. The key to success is commitment to the angling style, intense concentration and observation, patience, and once a large fish is spotted, being sneaky. Fishing this way brings you closer to trout. You get to watch their behavior and sometimes even see them think.
I remember a day in August when I crawled up behind a large rainbow that was feeding opportunistically six feet from shore in very shallow water. I decided to plop my fly down between it and the bank. It responded to the vibration, slid over, looked at my offering up close, real close, then slowly turned away, circled tightly and returned to look at my fly again. Then it suspended itself right in front of it for several seconds, slowly tipped its nose up and ate.
When you spend a lot of time fly fishing and walking rivers you see and discover many things…
coyote remains
buildings aging in the sun
another coyote
deer antlers on trail
bird nests made out of mud
trout on dries 