2020 is here already - looking forward to seeing everything you guys share! Here's a link to the 2019 picture thread for your convenience: https://www.refugeforums.com/threads/2019-picture-thread.1042872/
first easy hunt of the year Minutes later I was done. A flock settled in, dropped three. Got on the call and they came back, took the last bird at 10 yards. Sure got windy
This is what we do. Caleb is a licensed fly fishing guide now, apparently he can guide grouse, predators and waterfowl according to his license, but I figure that's unlikely. We've just started living out of the camper on May 1, but have to return to mt home regularly to fill orders for Caleb's wedding decor business on occasion. He pays me in fish, lol. Nothing real big yet, but we are getting dialed in. So far it's been just Caleb, a friend, Steve, and me doing the fishing. Need to order a couple of fly rods so we can have things rigged for different things, allows for a quicker route to figuring out what they are eating. Caleb guesses right most of the time and for some reason no one thinks trout eat in the morning, we have had the river to ourselves most of the time. Later in the day it's wall to wall boats, but we are ahead of the fray.
We are a dozen floats into fishing the blue ribbon trout streams of eastern Idaho. We fish the 'fringes' of the hatches is how I refer to it. It can get pretty crazy crowded during the salmon fly hatch. The shuttle service that moves trucks and trailers down from put in ramps to take out ramps for floaters were doing 100 boats a day on some stretches, not a place I want to be. Fishing the fringes means we take the road less traveled and hit sections that aren't packed with people and still do very well. We've caught several 20 inch fish so far this year, but no giants yet. I hooked a nice one on friday, but my inexperience with a fly rod bit me when the fish took a run and I discovered there was a half hitch knot around my reel and he hit the end of the line and was gone. About an hour later one of our guide buddies behind us caught a 24 inch brown in that same spot, ugh.
Caleb upped his game yesterday with this 24 inch hook jaw brown. He rarely gets to fish since he's almost always working the oars. I'm kind of glad he got this one in the boat before he's on the daily grind of guiding. He's always been good about being happy for the success of others, but it doesn't hurt to have a little success for yourself once in awhile.
Great! btw: I've caught a couple of browns that size by following our irrigation water upstream about 30 miles.
it's always impressed me how small of a stream or canal that brown trout can be found in. We had a crazy time the last four days, I don't even know how many trout we actually caught, 90% were over 17 inches with several 19-20. Lots of brown trout and a few fat rainbows, mostly on dry flies. It's green drake time, but most of our good fish were caught on flavs. Traffic on the river was pretty high during mid day, so we fished early and late and had a wonderful time. Occasionally we would drift through the boat traffic with nymphs and picked up some big rocky mountain bones (a more classy way to refer to those whitefish).
