Casey Sjolund

It’s been a while since I last updated the blog, not because I have been overly busy, although, I have been busy. It’s also not because I haven’t been fishing, as I have been fishing regardless of how high the water is due to record snowfall in the mountains that is finally melting and blowing out the local rivers. It’s not because there is no longer soccer on, there is MLS, but my passion is not as strong with MLS as it is with my love of Tottenham. Geographic closeness to an event apparently doesn’t hold the same amount of water as the joy of listening to the crowd at White Hart Lane. In all honesty I have no idea why I have not updated this recently.

I’d like to think that I would update this more often than not… but here we are.

Fishy and I decided to go on an adventure today and see a bit more of this area around Helena. So we drove up 15 about 30 miles and went fishing at Little Prickley Pear.

We didn’t have any luck, but it was nice to get out there and see some new water.

So its been a while since my last update, and I can understand why it might look like I have not been out fishing, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I have been out roughly 5-6 times to the same spot on the Gallatin river having excellent results on dries. Today I went out and had a nice double digit day with only one fish under 12 inches. The fish were mainly eating a dark bodied caddis, but I also had some luck on an adams. Oddly enough the browns were hitting the Adams and the bows were hitting the caddis.

Either way today was an exceptional day to fish, the weather was in the eighties, the leaves are changing colors and now my fly box is a bit light on caddis flies. Guess I need to tie up some more.

Note to self: you are out of dry fly hooks in size 14-20. Please restock… and it wouldn’t hurt to stock up on some more gold bead heads in the size 18-20 range.

Matt, Melissa, Fishy and I headed down to Dillon for our yearly trip, which includes the Patagonia outlet sale and fishing. We started out at the outlet sale which was completely, well… crazy. It is strange to wait in line to get into a retail store on a Sunday afternoon, but I guess it’s what you do when there are prices are that low. The only problem is that by Sunday, three days after the sale starts, there are only XS,S and XXL stuff left. Needless to say, this year I didn’t buy anything.

On our way from the sale we hopped into the camping rig and headed to Poindexters Slough. As soon as we stepped out of the car weird weather rolled in. The clouds appeared and wind started to whip, which dropped the temp to the point that we all layered up and put on our winter hats. The year before we had a good day on the river, this year not so much. The wind made fishing difficult. I had two violent strikes on a hopper dropper combo but missed them both, well that is not entirely true, the second fish ended up with a hopper/dropper souvenir. Shortly after this we decided to call it a day and head up to Clark Canyon reservoir to get a camp spot.

The night was a bit cold as the wind dropped the mercury further than it would have without it, but luckily Melissa located some wood and we had a decent fire that upped the warmth threshold a bit. Plus I learned a nice trick from a friend on another cold camping trip a few years back, boil the water in your Nalgene and take that with you to bed. That helped keep me nice and toasty all night long.

The next day we drove all over the Dillon area trying to find good wade access to the Beaverhead but just didn’t find anything that was not extremely deep or full of dense foliage. So we decided to get some lunch in Dillon and formulate a game plan. At first we thought that we would do the same thing as last year and hit the Big Hole and drive into Butte, but Melissa came up with a good idea, that we should fish the Ruby. This was a good idea for two reasons, one it put us on a river none of us had fished, and two, it cut some time off our return trip to Bozeman. At first we had a few problems locating access to this river, as the river followed the road we were on but never quite came within eyesight of it. We eventually found an access spot and fished for a few hours.

The Ruby is a beautiful gem of a river, the water was crystal clear and cold enough to fish, and the scenery was also quite easy on the eyes. The fishing on the other hand was slow… extremely slow. We were about to turn around and head back to the car but we decided to see what was behind one more bend in the river. This was a good call as we hit a man made damn that widened the river and opened up some nice feeding lanes for some fish. I was luckily enough to hook into two brown trout within a few minutes of fishing this location. Felt good to finally feel a tug at the end of the line after struggling so hard the last few days, I would have hated to go home with not only no Patagonia deals but no fish to hand either.

We ended up back in Bozeman by about six pm after dropping Matt off at his place in Belgrade. Melissa, Fishy and I were all extremely pooped from an exhausting, but wonderful, two days excursion.

A friend came into town for a visit and we figured it would be in our best interest to do a little camping and fishing. So we started out the week with a trip to the Madison river. We found a great camp spot on the river, blew up our tubes and proceeded for a early evening float. The water was ideal temp and so was the air, even with the harsh wind the float was still extremely enjoyable.

The next morning we headed over to the East to do a little fishing. We jumped in near Spains and headed downstream. The water level was perfect and so was the water temperature. We fished a hole and each had some success. I got into a couple small browns and Matt caught his first trout on a fly rod. We headed down stream to fish some other locations, but one thing became instantly clear, the river that I was familiar with was no longer a river I was familiar with. This years run off drastically changed this portion of the river. One of the bends I loved to fish was no longer a bend but dried up and now the river ran straight, shallow and wide. The rest of the day we didn’t have any luck, a few brief hook ups but nothing to hand.

The next morning we both ended up with a sunburn but decided that it was the last day on Matt’s two day license and we should go get some use out of it. We headed back to the East but went to a different bridge and jumped in, again the water and weather couldn’t have been better. Again a couple brief hookups early on with nothing to hand, the river here changed slightly, mainly some of the river crossing were deeper and harder to manage than they once were, but overall shape of the river was still nice. The highlight of the day was when Matt hooked into a pig of a bow. It was really awesome to see someone new to fly fishing get into a fish of that size (16-20 inches), the fish made some spectacular jumps before we finally had him to hand and we snapped a few photos, unfortunately you can’t see the full size of the fish due to the excitement of the fisherman and cameraman. Either way it was pretty sweet to see.

Matt was fishing a flashback pheasanttail in about a size 18.

Fished the East today at Spains for about 15 minutes with Matt. We ended up fishing private water in a private subdivision where one of Matt’s friends lived.

It wasn’t a complete bust, I got into a few fish and so did Matt’s friend.