THAT’S HOW WE ROLL • TOP TO BOTTOM • Will Broeder of Snake River Angler nets my first-cast fish on Wyoming’s Green River. The Green is very close to my idea of the perfect trout river: quite remote, with stunning surroundings and just the right size. It’s not so big that it feels intimidating and not so small that it gets predictable. My first cast in America produced my first American trout. That fish really brought everyone´s shoulders down, and I find low shoulders to be a prerequisite for success in flyfishing—as well as for most other things in life, including making music. A few months before the tour, a guy named Will Hensley had contacted us. He wanted us to come to a newly opened place called the Meadows on Rock Creek. We reached out to Jason Borger, who served as our bullshit filter while we planned the tour, and asked him if we should go for it. Jason replied, “Well, if somebody offered me private luxury accommoda-tions on one of Montana’s blue-ribbon trout streams for free, I’d probably take them up on it.” Rock Creek was teeming with trout—cutthroat, rainbows, browns and brook trout, all wild fish. The main attraction for us were the cutthroat, since this would be our only real chance of hooking up with them. We caught plenty, incredibly beautiful, good-sized fish. Though the guides wanted us to fish hopper-droppers and Woolly Buggers whenever the fishing slowed, we had learned our lesson. No Scandinavian mumbling or apologies. You just have to say no. “Only one dry fly for us, sorry. That’s how we roll.” HUBRIS ON THE MISSOURI Craig, MT, has 40 residents, three huge fly shops, a restaurant and a bar. It also has plenty of guides, lots of huge cars and about as many drift boats. There we met John Arnold, a rock-solid guy who co-runs Headhunters Fly Shop. He took two days off work to show us the Missouri along with his colleagues Whitney Gould and Kurt Michels. The Mighty Mo—it is a huge river, and it’s com-pletely packed with trout. The hatches are incredible, a real wall-to-wall carpet, and the insects are tiny. A size-14 mayfly is a big bug on the Missouri—quite the juxtaposition compared to our Green River float. Given that the water was very high, John insisted we fish from a boat since it is forbidden to walk along the river on private land in Montana. After a few casts, John said, “You’re never gonna catch anything with that cast.” He was giving it to me straight. I had tried a stan-dard Norwegian dry fly presentation: let a 50-to 60-foot cast drop gently to the water 10 feet upstream of the pod of rising fish—at least five large trout were close together, sipping size-18 mayfly spin-ners, hugging the riverbank. John was right. Turns out Nordic-style dry fly fishing doesn’t work in high water on the Missouri. After some fumbling, I swallowed my pride and asked for help. John’s advice was straightforward. 1. Cast short and quite hard, almost straight down-stream. The fly should not land more than eight inches upstream of the fish. 2. Don’t shoot line on the presentation because that might make the leader drift in front of the fly, and the fish will never take. 3. Fish a shorter leader. Since the fish are hanging two inches below the surface, they see only a tiny part of it. 4. It’s almost never the fly that’s the prob-lem; it’s the drift. When you’ve had 100 good drifts over the fish, you can consider changing the fly. You haven’t had a single good drift over the fish yet. A steep learning curve. I rerigged with John’s instructions and tried again. John said, “I like that cast,” and splash! A freakishly strong, 100-percent-wild rainbow trout was suddenly a yard in the air. “See? You’re doing it, man,” John said. 046 JAZZ & FLY FISHING
The Flyfish Journal The Flyfish Journal 15.4: Page 44
