June update, best time of year on the Big Hole!

If you blinked this spring, and woke up in June, we are right there with you! We are looking forward to a fun few weeks of fishing on the Big Hole, with a lot of folks already anticipating the arrival of the big bugs. Everyone has their special formulas for predicting when the salmonflies might arrive, but don't wear out your calculators too early. We are keeping an eye on water temperatures and flows, doing some bird watching for tanagers, looking for lilac flowers, and all of the other indicators that people use for the annual hatch.

Our favorite way of monitoring the upcoming hatch is easy, go fishing and take water temperatures. Water temps are higher than average for this time of year, so you can use that as an indication of when we may see some bugs crawling out of the Big Hole River. We look for temps around 56 degrees.

So, how about the current fishing conditions? We are anticipating a good week of fishing, with a weather system moving into the state that will drop our air temps back to average. Partly cloudy skies and cooler temps should have the fish eager to chase some streamers. The PMD's have started to hatch on the upper river, and we have found fish eating them from about 10 AM until early afternoon. The Mother's Day Caddis are pretty much done. After the PMD's wrap up, you could twitch some streamers off the banks (Al has been having good luck with the old faithful pumpkin bugger) or tie on a dry-dropper or nymph rig to find the fish feeding sub-surface. This would also be a good time to use a big Pat's rubber leg. Other recommended streamers are Sparkle Minnow (sculpin, #6), Rusty Trombone, JJ Special and Mini Dungeons. For dry flies, Rocky Mountain Mint (purple or PMD), Purple Haze, Olive micro chubby. Nymphs: black perdigon and TNT jig,

We are really hoping to see one more big flush of water while there is still some snow in the mountains. Current snow pack for the Big Hole sub-basin is 57%. Our current flows are below average for this time of year, which has made for some great fishing, but we would like to see some higher flows to move some sediment off the cobble rocks, and buffer us for July and August.

Enjoy June! The Big Hole will be at its busiest in the coming weeks; keep fish wet, be courteous to other river users, pick up some trash, and use some common sense in boat ramp parking lots!