It was a gloomy late February day in Montana. 40 degrees, cloudy, but calm. And to most people, it would have been a time to hunker down near the wood stove at home. Luckily for me, I had a friend and coworker who convinced me it was time to get out and fish. Ben had been fishing all winter, primarily in tailwaters, but we decided that the local river was worth the break from work for some fishing.
It was my first fishing trip of the year, but even more importantly, it was a new chapter in my fly fishing career. You see, I’ve been fly fishing for somewhere around a decade now, but never like I do now.
I started out as a fair weather fly fisherman. In fact, the only reason I got into the sport was because several local lakes in my northern Maine stomping grounds required it. I can still remember my father and I whipping out terrible casts with grasshopper patterns and still hammering the trout on our favorite ‘fly fishing only’ remote pond. But I don’t believe such forced circumstances are what creates a fly fisherman.
When I moved out West to pursue a career, I brought with me both the ambitions of a greenhorn fly fisherman as well as the roots of a worm-and-spinner bait slinger. And I switched it up a bit with artificial lures. I wanted to be a fly fisherman, but I also knew that certain water conditions favor different techniques. So each trip, I went to the water with two rods. I’d start with the fly rod and try my darndest to force the trout to eat the big dry fly I decided looked prettiest. If that didn’t work, I immediately switched over to the old reliable – lures or bait – and almost invariably caught several fish.
It wasn’t until I finally wised up and decided to force myself to become a fly angler that the real growth began. I began leaving the spinning rod at home, and forced myself to catch fish with flies. If I couldn’t catch fish on flies, I’d better improve to the point where I would.
At first it was hard, but I picked up plenty of tips and tricks along the way and became a better fisherman with each trip. There were good days and bad. I learned to rely more on different varieties of flies, particularly nymphs, to catch fish during those slow days in cold water.
After a while, I became what I like to consider a decent fly fisherman. I could go to most any water and catch fish when they were biting. In fact, in most streams I found fly fishing easier and more effective than spinning gear. I was happy, and I enjoyed fly fishing. It evolved from a hobby into a sport, and I fished fairly often.
Then something happened. I became complacent, but I think it happened so slowly that I didn’t notice it at first. I soon found that I fished when it was convenient, and when it wasn’t, I didn’t. Other activities consumed a lot of my time. Hunting and trapping were major commitments. I had just started bowhunting. These were great, enjoyable activities and helped put lots of food in the freezer, but fishing definitely took a back seat.
As we descended down the snowy roadside bank in chest waders, fly rods in hand, I remembered what winter had been like that year. It was slow. I had time to relax, and time to think. I found myself thinking a lot about fishing in general, and fly fishing in particular. A couple of ice fishing trips to the local lake broke up the monotony, but I kept thinking about that fly rod back in the closet at the house.
Sometime during that long winter, I finally broke down. I had resisted fly tying for a long time. I had plenty of excuses, the best being that I just didn’t have the time or money to do it all. But I did break down, and during one weekend shopping trip to the big city, I went into Cabela’s and bought a fly tying kit.
I’d only been tying for a couple of days and had about half a dozen self-tied flies in my box. My fishing partner Ben, who was now stringing up his rod and getting ready to wade into the river, had shown me how to tie a variation of the pheasant tail nymph that worked well here.
I started by tying on one of Ben’s nymphs. We were rigged up to fish slow water, with long leaders, split shot sinkers and slip-on bobbers. Ben figured the rainbows and browns from all around were stacked up in this deep, slow hole during cold weather and fishing the hole slowly with nymphs was the way to go. After his first cast brought in a 13″ rainbow, I was easily convinced.
We fished that slow hole in the river for about an hour, and each landed over half a dozen beauties, all exceeding the 12″ mark, and some approaching 17″. My heart was filled with joy. It was February in Montana, the water temperature was barely above freezing, and we were hauling in the fish. I’m still not sure it gets much better than that. I thought about the winter, about the desire I had to fish more, and my first foray into the fly tying world.
We moved on to another hole about a mile up the road, a similar place where the trout are stacked up during the cold winter months when it takes more energy to stay in fast water than they can afford. This time I tied my first self-tied fly onto the leader. I was getting confident, and figured I might just as well find out whether my little creation of hook, thread, feathers and wire could actually entice a fish. It did. I landed a pretty brown trout, the largest we’d caught all day, with a huge smile on my face. Today was a good day, and I knew right then and there that it was surely shaping up to be a great season on the water.
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