Big Hole River 1940 cfs
When my client showed up this morning I asked if he wanted to go way up river. I told him there aren’t as many fish up there but there are some huge ones. He was all for it as he wasn’t interested in numbers and he would really like to get a big one. For the first two hours we didn’t see a fish. We caught a couple nice branches and at least it was a tug on the line. I was going through one of those things where we threw the whole fly box at them. Ed didn’t seem too worried about it, but I was. We picked up a couple brookies and a couple bows and then it died again. About an hour later we hit pay dirt. We came out of this channel and I told him to hit the seam off the tip of the island and almost instantly we had one of those big boys we were looking for. I pulled the boat over to the shore and got out to net him in some back water. It was a 23 inch male brown trout with shoulders on him. As I was backing up from the boat to get a picture of him my foot caught on snag or something and I did a full backward gainer into the water. However this didn’t stop the photo op as I had the camera out of the water and while I was laying on my back in shallow water I got a great shot of Ed holding the fish and laughing his head off. I had my waders rolled down so of course my backside was filled with water and mud. When I got back to the shop Art made a comment that it looked like I had messed myself and I had better go home and clean up. It’s fishing kind of like John Madden’s favorite type of football, sometimes you have to get into the mud and the grit and the grime to really enjoy it.