The mayfly species Maccaffertium vicarium, commonly known to fly anglers as the March Brown, makes its appearance on the local rivers sometime in April and provides one of the more exciting hatches of the season. With some help from a friend who's no stranger to the annual March Brown hatch, I tied up several comparadun patterns in size 14. We took a ride down to the river … [Read more...] about March Brown Hatch
My Fishing Trips
Anyone Can Catch A Blind Fish!
I guess you could say I was feeling pretty proud of myself when I was pulling this fish in.......same way I'd felt about most of the other fish I'd caught that day. But it can humble a guy when he takes a closer look and realizes that the fish he just fooled into eating his handily-crafted nymph was actually blind in one eye! One would like to think that the one blind eye … [Read more...] about Anyone Can Catch A Blind Fish!
The Rainbow Run: Stacked Up
It was a cool, cloudy April day when I decided I'd had enough of the office and needed to get out and fish. I had a pretty nice arsenal of freshly tied nymphs I was dying to try, and I'd had pretty good success in this stretch of creek for the past few days. It had snowed an inch or two earlier that morning, but most of it was melting off pretty good and I figured the water … [Read more...] about The Rainbow Run: Stacked Up
First on a Dry
In mid-March, 2010, I made my way to a nearby stream on a beautiful sunny afternoon. The water was cold (43 degrees) so I decided to stick to the few slow, deep holes where the trout were likely to be stacked up. I was fishing with some nymphs I'd tied up, at the end of a length of tippet dropping below a self-tied elk hair caddis I was using as a strike indicator. I'm not … [Read more...] about First on a Dry
A New Chapter
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 … [Read more...] about A New Chapter