Big Hole River 147 cfs Beaverhead River 384 cfs
We had a lot of fun on the Beaverhead today mostly because we didn’t have to go to nymphs. Mid morning there were enough tricos on the upper part to get a few good sized fish looking up. The presentation to these fish had to be perfect and we even dropped down to 6x which I seldom do. We had a trico dun with a trico emerger sneaking up behind and that’s the one most of the fish ate. Of course on that 6x some of them broke off immediately. With the trico hatch over we tried some hopper patterns and that was a complete bust. We started to get some cloud cover so rather than doing the nymph thing we tried some streamers and they worked. It wasn’t real consistent but in a couple runs we had several fish and got two that were worthy of a photo. All in all it was a good day on the Beav. I talked to a couple other guides who were fishing exclusively with nymphs and they said it was a bit tough. They had novice fisherman and streamers were not an option. Some times when I have novices I make them learn to chuck streamers for the simple reason that they self educate. If they don’t wait and load the line on their back cast it will inevitably smack them in the back of the head. After doing this several times they either don a hard hat or start casting correctly. After a novice learns to cast streamers he is ready for every thing.
We postponed our fly over this morning due to the smokey conditions. Tomorrow is the last day our pilot will be sober for awhile so it looks like all systems are a go.