Big Hole River 761 cfs Jefferson River 941
Art and I both had the day off the river but by late afternoon we closed the shop a little early and decided to do a R & D trip. Also we wanted to try out the new raft in the upper canyon to see how it performed. I’ll have to say I was quite impressed as it was easy to handle and we went over rocks that my old raft would have hung up on. Through the pinball it performed very well jockeying through the boulders.
One of our objectives was to test try different patterns. When we caught a fish on a certain fly, we took it off and tried another one. That’s the whole idea of such a trip. We caught fish on just about every pattern we tried and that included standard adams, para adams, elk hair caddis, goddard caddis, chernoble ant, irresistable, royal trude and royal wulff. These trips are a lot of fun because there is no pressure to catch fish and the only problem is to decide which fly to try next. At times when I was rowing I would tell Art to tie on a certain pattern with another dropper and I would wait until he had it all rigged up and then say, its your turn to row. This worked a few times until he finally wised up.
Forecast for tomorrow is 70 percent chance of rain and cloudy–great conditions.