Thirty Fish or More

Today is Granny’s day, again. Actually it’s mine too because we went to a place we both love very much, the Piniella River. It’s a river we like to float because there’s not much fishing traffic (although today we saw three other boats) and there’s numerous fish to catch on big stupid looking dry flies. I like to twitch the winged Chernobyl Ant in the seams and along the banks. Once again, this is by no means a location for big trout but the small ones are numerous. We get several species – brook trout, rainbow and cutthroat (both Snake River and Yellowstone cutts) and when you want them, plenty of whitefish.

This was a rest day after the hike of yesterday. Granny made us a heck of a lunch and even squeezed a couple of ice cold beers in my dirty cooler. The rowing is easy here so you can kick back and drift, drop anchor or just steer all while you are fishing. We picked a particularly long float so we got a very early start. I was doing a ten mile bike shuttle before 8 am. When I finished Granny had the boat ready to rock and off we went.

On this river, the fish are generally so small that we keep count and set goals. Today we were shooting for 25 fish. Keeping count may sound ridiculous to some but for us it makes it fun. If we don’t set a goofy goal like this then we tend not to put much effort into our fishing on this river. With the high fish goal each fish means something despite their being small. We even do things like no food until we catch three and no beer until you catch five (that will make you concentrate).

Things started slower than expected. There’s hardly room for one boat on this river in August let alone the three others we saw. Naturally they had the same plan as us of starting early so right out of the gate we kept running into one another. They didn’t seem to know the river so we slowed down our pace considerably to get them out of our sight for good. We dropped anchor on a favorite bank of ours and over the course of an hour we managed six fish – an even mix of cuttys and brookies.

We never saw more much more after that other than lots of birds including a family of owls, a porcupine of which I discovered because I heard some willows getting munched and over thirty fish. To our delight, three of these trout were pretty darn nice. We didn’t get off the river until 7:30 pm and it will go down as one of our most relaxing days of the summer.

During these last two days I wore my Granny out. She always teases me when I’m tired after fishing a bunch of days in a row, but she knows. Fishing and being outdoors all day gives you the kind of tired we all need more of. Now its back to work for Granny and believe it or not, I’m going to bust out some art tomorrow. I’m excited to say that I sold some art in my galleries and received more orders from my website then ever. Good stuff!

Today is Granny’s day, again. Actually it’s mine too because we went to a place we both love very much, the Piniella River. It’s a river we like to float because there’s not much fishing traffic (although today we saw three other boats) and there’s numerous fish to catch on big stupid looking dry flies. I like to twitch the winged Chernobyl in the seams and along the banks. Once again, this is by no means a location for big trout but the small ones are numerous. We get several species – brook trout, rainbow and cutthroat (both Snake River and Yellowstone cuts) and when you want them, plenty of whitefish.

This was a rest day after the hike of yesterday. Granny made us a heck of a lunch and even squeezed a couple of ice cold beers in my dirty cooler. The rowing is easy here so you can kick back and drift, drop anchor or just steer all while you are fishing. We picked a particularly long float so we got a very early start. I was doing a ten mile bike shuttle before 8 am. When I finished Granny had the boat ready to rock and off we went.

On this river, the fish are generally so small that we keep count and set goals. Today we were shooting for 25 fish. Keeping count may sound ridiculous to some but for us it makes it fun. If we don’t set a goofy goal like this then we tend not to put much effort into our fishing on this river. With the high fish goal each fish means something despite their being small. We even do things like no food until we catch three and no beer until you catch five (that will make you concentrate).

Things started slower than expected. There’s hardly room for one boat on this river in August let alone the three others we saw. Naturally they had the same plan as us of starting early so right out of the gate we kept running into one another. They didn’t seem to know the river so we slowed down our pace considerably to get them out of our sight for good. We dropped anchor on a favorite bank of ours and over the course of an hour we managed six fish – an even mix of cuttys and brookies.

Jeff Currier Global Fly Fishing web site