Last week I talked about a high mountain flyfishing trip while on a visit to the River Retreat Lodge over in the Swan Valley area.
Tuesday afternoon while the guide, John Douville and I were still up high in the high-country fishing, my good buddies Ron and Betsy Spomer came over. John and I hiked down from fishing that night and met them at the lodge for dinner.
It was good to see Ron and Betsy and we all sat up talking until too late along with John, Liz and their daughter. The next day we were going to do a drift boat trip down the South Fork of the Salmon.
We were excited about that trip. Drift boats are the ultimate flyfishing adventure and especially on a river inundated with cutthroats. John didn’t quite guarantee us that we’d catch a lunker cutthroat but there was a really good chance that we could net some 20 + inchers. Who wouldn’t get excited about that opportunity?
Big fish is what excites a flyfisherman. Here John netted a nice 20-inch rainbow.
The next morning three other fishermen from Arizona that were touring the country on Harleys had drifted the river the day before.
They were eating breakfast with us Wednesday morning and one of them named Gentry just happened to have a pic of a good 20-inch trout that he had netted.
If we weren’t excited before, we sure were now. I was down drinking coffee early before Ron and Betsy came down and by that time Gentry’s story had improved a good bit and I think in that short 10-15 minutes the fish had grown a good 3-inches but what the heck, fishermen never let the truth stand in the way of a good story do we?
We had been going to leave early but John said there hadn’t been a hatch before noon that week so we’d wait a little bit.
The drop-off point wasn’t far from the lodge so after a few more cups of coffee we were soon unloading the boats. Ron & Betsy got in John’s boat and I was in a buddy of John’s named Charley.
He had me start off with a small nymph with a trailing nymph and an indicator above and told me to cast within a foot of the bank. Right off the bat I started drilling some super big whitefish. Everyone will tell you that whitefish are super bony and no good to eat. I had a couple of Rapala fillet knives that I wanted to test so I kept two whitefish to fillet and smoke. I will write about how that project in another article at a later date. But for now, the fillets were 10-inches long so I assume the whitefish were a good 16-17 inches long.
We drifted by a pretty waterfall.
While the whitefish were fun to catch, the target fish were big cutthroats. A mile or two down the river we caught up with the other boat. Ron said he was throwing a big grass hopper and getting a lot of strikes of which, I think he said was 6-8 were big cutties. So, of course I quickly switched over to a Dave’s Hopper.
To fish a hopper, you for sure want to drift your hopper within 1-foot of the grassy river banks to simulate one falling into the river.
I wasn’t getting many hits on my hopper but I did have one huge cutthroat come up and slam it for a hot second. Dang, if I could of netted him the whole trip would have been worthwhile even if I hadn’t of netted another fish. I had a super clear view of him and he was a good 20-inches.
My hits slowed down so I switched back to a nymph. Charley was a really knowledgeable guide and a good teacher. I learned a lot from him. He really pushed me to be hitting the ripples hard and by the end of the day I understood why.
The last ripple we hit there were a lot of fish feeding on it. Ron & Betsy pulled up right after we had and we all were throwing PMD’s, I think about size 18-20’s. Wow, wish they had of been feeding this good all day.
Fishing was getting better but John finally reminded us that Liz was trying out a new chef that night and we had to be there to eat at 8:00. So, we had to kick off and drift on downstream ½ mile to the ramp to load up the boats.
There are a lot of fun outdoor activities but fishing the bigger rivers in a drift boat could be addictive. I can see how these guys totally dedicate themselves to this one activity. If you’ve never hired a guide to drift a river flyfishing, you ought to try it out. But I will forewarn you, drift boat flyfishing can be addictive!
As I said above, Liz had brought in a new chef that night to test on us. If you ask my opinion, I say hire him. But I may need one more plate of BBQ spare ribs to make a final decision.
Tom Claycomb is a hunting enthusiast and writes a bi-monthly column for Great Basin Sun.