FIRST POST!
Welcome to my first post on my personal blog. I have a heck of a time getting the other guys at the shop to post on the shop blog, so I figured I'd start one for myself wherein I can rant and rave and talk both about guiding and fishing the Yellowstone area and about adventures elsewhere. We'll see if I manage to keep it on-topic and keep it to fly fishing. Beware of cultural/political ranting!
Today I actually am posting about fishing. On the 26th, Ben Jewell (PFS guide), Satoshi Yamamoto (new contract guide) and I hit up the Story Lakes for our spring check run. We always like to get to each of the lakes we guide/fish on at about this time of year, both to see how the lakes made it through the winter and to get some big fish pictures to stick on the website and the shop window in order to book a few trips in May, which can be lean times for us because the Yellowstone's in runoff and the park isn't open yet. The lakes can be great this time of year, though, and they are seldom booked solid like they can be in June.
We spent more time on Upper Story Lake than lower. The upper lake is more popular in general and has bigger fish, but the lower is usually a bit more out of the wind and has wild 12-16" brook trout, which if you're familiar with the small (6-9") average size of brookies around here ought to make you drool. The lower lake didn't fish for beans, only producing around five fish and not many more hits, and all but one of the fish we landed were small rainbows in the 11-13" range, with the other being a nice, fat 18" bow Satoshi got. The one brookie we saw whacked Satoshi's leech while he was dragging it behind the boat as we moved to a new spot, and in the brief glimpse we all got of it looked to be more like eighteen inches than the 16" top end we saw last year. This lake fished better last season after around the 10th of May, so I'm going to file that nice fish away for later...
The upper lake fished decent. Actually, it fished pretty good but inconsistently, with the only flies producing more than about two hits being a #14 black Merrell Lake Bomber chironomid and a #16 PMD BLM nymph (which doesn't look at all like a PMD). Not coincidentally, those were probably the flies we had on the longest. Other bugs that caught fish were unweighted Prince nymphs, a tan leech of Satoshi's invention, a red and black chironomid, the Jewell Thief streamer, and a #16 Trina's Bubble Back nymph. We caught around 15 fish in the upper lake and lost quite a few others, so there were some other flies in there, but we changed it up enough that I can't remember which ones.
The lake seemed to make it through the winter great, and produced a good range of fish sizes, from around 12" up to an almost grotesquely fat rainbow in the 20" class that Ben got and this beauty of Satoshi's, which was probably around the same weight of Ben's fish but was a bit more symmetrical and pretty.
Here are Ben and I with a couple more. On the pic of me, you can tell how interested Ben is in my fish versus catching another one of his own.
My next post will probably be about our spring check run on Merrell Lake unless we can float the Yellowstone sometime this upcoming week. Right now it's blown out with an early spike of spring runoff, but it might get low and clear enough to fish well with streamers early in the week. I also plan to document a road trip I'll be taking in mid-May. Right now the plan for that is a long ramble through southern Missouri, fishing for everything under the sun (gar, carp, smallmouth, trout, we'll see what else) with relatives, friends, and my own self. Thanks for reading.
