Man cannot live on cycling, triathlon, road trips, local craft beer, coffee, podcasts, cabin building, huckleberry shakes, and endless turkey sandwiches alone.  There needs to be fishing!  Especially in Montana!

My friend Joe and I have fished all over the place including co-owning a wood drift boat when we lived in Eugene, Oregon.  We usually fished for trout on the Mackenzie River, but would also make a trek down to the Rogue River to catch a few hundred smallmouth bass in a day until our arms fell off.  Here is a photo of the boat with my dad next to it.  We restored that thing from the brink of death to a beautiful craft.

Joe is the best fishing guide a brother can have.  He is an amazing fisherman and used to work for Shimano Fishing as well.  It doesn’t get any better than fishing with Joe while enjoying a cold beer and some Chili Cheese Fritos!  My standard on-the-river fishing nourishment.

On our first day, we hit the Clark Fork River looking for big brown and rainbow trout. He had caught them in abundance with another friend two weeks beforehand as shown below.

On this day the conditions were a little different than when they were catching those hogs.  The water two weeks before was a bit more stirred up because the run-off from the mountains was still in full force as the snow melt was still on.  Today, it was crystal clear in the river which meant if we could see them they could see us.  That made it more much more challenging.

We saw many “submarines” take off once they saw us.  These trout were huge and smart!  We had to start looking for bushes and other cover to fish from so they didn’t see us.  We also had to approach them from the back instead of head-on or from the side.  We were just to exposed most of the time.

Learning from my mistakes, I walked far away from the river and then crept up low and slow to a bush that I could cast from next to the water.  I tossed my lure downstream over the bush into a slow pool adjacent to the end of a rapid.  I got a hit, but it was light.  I cast down to the area again and immediately a trout crushed it and jumped not once, but three times in a row!  I had to do my best to reel him from around 40 feet out without leading him out into the heavy current so we could land him.

It was a beautiful 18″ Brown Trout!  Our estimate was 2 to 2.5 pounds.  Other than a smaller Brown Trout that I caught, this would be the extent of our catch for the day which we released back into the Clark Fork River get even bigger.

A few days later, we went all in with his new inflatable drift boat on the Big Hole River where Brenna joined us as well.

Unfortunately, there are few photos from this day as we were seriously fishing hard and I also did not bring my phone on purpose.  With two other phones in the boat, no reason to bring mine and potentially drop it in the river.

We were on the river for 8 hours, caught trout and whitefish on both fly rods and spinners.  We started with spinners and then switched to fly rods when the hatch started coming off the river.  It got so thick at times it was more of an infestation or a cloud than a hatch!

It was a beautiful day on the river, we dodged three big storms, and caught plenty of trout!