Creekside
The hot temperatures here in Montana shows that summer is finally here. We have now had multiple days in the 90′s and this past Sunday was no exception. The thermometer read 97F as Zack and I pulled onto I-90. We haven’t been filming any fishing edits recently, due to the fact that we have just been trying to get back into our fly fishing groove after bear hunting for over a month straight. I did however film a commercial for a fly fishing company based out of Idaho called Cutthroat Leaders. Cutthroat Leaders are hand furled leaders and are great for presenting dry flies. (We’ll have that short video up soon and more info on the leaders we have been using over the past three weeks.) Anyways, our plan was to spend the last 5 hours of our afternoon filming on one of our favorite creeks.
We arrived to a car parked in our spot, we were hoping they were not fishing the same stretch as us. While gearing up we had a gentleman and his wife pull off the road. Oh great, we thought another guy trying to fish, but we were pleasantly surprised that the guy had recognized our truck and just wanted to introduce himself and his wife to us, and knew us through our Montana Wild fishing videos. Pretty dang cool! I love meeting extremely friendly people here in Montana! After some short chit chat we were off for the river, and the water was looking promising. We didn’t see any risers in the first pool, but fished the pool blind with some dry flies. Soon enough I had a couple takes and brought a small brown to the net. We moved upriver, with little success other than some small bows and browns.
After fishing a deep hole, we spotted the lone fly fisherman walking down the center of the creek. Well, there goes our high hopes of fishing some untouched water for the afternoon. The guy was friendly enough and we contemplated what hole we wanted to fish next. We decided to hike upriver to one of our favorite holes for dry fly action. Zack had missed a fish under a small bush along this bank last year. Zack sets up the camera and tells me there has to be a fish under that bush again this year. I switched up my fly to a small caddis pattern, and BAM 1st cast I get a nice take from a beautiful largemouth cutthroat!
Zack almost didn’t even have the camera rolling in time, but he got the shot and we were excited to see a good size cutthroat taking the fly. I wrangled in some smaller fish the remainder of the evening, but its not always about big fish. The night finished off with an amazing sunset. Nothing beats Montana! Hopefully we’ll have an edit or two out soon. We are looking foreward to the last week in July. We’re planning our largest film project of the summer as we’ll be headed to the Bob Marshall and doing some backcountry fishing. Things are looking up.
-Travis