I fished the Missouri River in Montana for the first time over the last few days. What a great river with great numbers of fish and lots of really big fish.
This trip was hosted by the folks at RIO and me and a two other fly shop owners had the pleasure of getting to know a few of the main guys responsible for the sales, marketing and manufacturing of RIO lines
Once or twice a year a friend or customer tells me they encountered a big hatch of Callibaetis mayflies on Pass Lake. I’ve fished Pass Lake a quite frequently for about 15 years now and I’ve often seen Callibaetis, but I’ve never seen numbers of them big enough to stir much interest from me or the fish. I always told them they were almost certainly seeing the big chironomids bombers and that Pass Lake doesn’t get anything beyond a sporadic Callibaetis hatch.
Yesterday, I proved myself wrong.</p
So its Fathers day. Couldn’t hit the river with pops this morning which is too bad. But for the middle of June the river has been pretty non-forgiving as of late. June is the time of year on the Sky where usually a skunk doesn’t happen let alone three in a row. But today I finally got out of the foul odor of the skunk. It wasn’t a banner day on the river didn’t see anybody else with a fish. Hopefully this warm weather stretch will bump the river up to big and get those fish that have been hanging out deep in the lower river moving up and into the fly water.
Not that I am a fan of that show, but according to the stats it is always sunny in Wenatchee. Well I have been spending quite a bit of time on this river since it has opened. Mason beat me to one of the posts and its been busy going back and forth. But although fishing hasn’t been red hot like it was last year around this time. But for the venturing few that have been out there, there is a few willing takers.
Mason and I took the boat to the Cowlitz and headed up river from the town of Toledo. We fished water from Toledo all the way up to the Blue Creek area. It was fun to spend a day on a river I have never fished before but have heard so much about. There were lots of other jet boats but only one other group of fly anglers. We only watched one steelhead get hooked by other anglers pulling plugs but I bet the gear guys were finding some fish in the deeper water.
Sorry we haven’t had a recent blog report posted in a while but we’ve been very busy. After many months of work, we have finally launched the new version of our website and catalog. Nice job by Peter, PFF’s in-house web guru, for making this new site way more technically advanced, better looking, and much more interesting.
You will hopefully notice many new features on the new site and a ton of new functionality in the catalog… such as wish lists, online gift certificates, (optional) user account creation and maintenance, and much more.
Welcome to our new fly fishing report blog. We’re hoping this will be a great new tool for us at PFF to provide you with up-to-date fishing reports. Like most fly shops, we WANT to provide killer fishing reports. We know we SHOULD be making the time to provide reports…. But it just never makes the top of the priority list and it doesn’t get done.
Believe me, if you worked at the shop, you would quickly understand why it happens that way.
Those of you that frequent Pacific Fly Fishers know that there are few days when Ben and I both have the day off. Well, that’s the beauty of major holidays when the shop is closed, and we took advantage of Easter Sunday to try and repeat our success at a local bass lake.
Nothing too exciting for me to report fishing-wise for this last week… but I did fly down to Denver for three days to go to the International Fly Tackle Dealer (IFTD) show. This show is for the manufacturers to show their products to retail buyers and the press. It is also where most manufacturers announce their new products for the year.