I fished the Yellowstone Riverin the run below a tributary stream on Tuesday. Fishing was weird. The winter ice changed the configuration of the tributary mouth considerably, preventing the river from washing away some large ice shelves deposited all along the mouth of the creek and significantly altering the river at and below the mouth of the creek. Now there's a deep slot right at the creek mouth, and the run 25 yards downstream is a huge, slow eddy, with only a short run right at its top. In previous years, the best water was the run, with very limited fishing right at the mouth, where the river flowed fast, shallow, and without many boulders to create cover. In the middle of summer the mouth was great, since the river is up in the bushes and flows around boulders that are high and dry this time of year, but usually in March the water was just too fast for trout with relatively slow metabolisms to deal with, except when they hit the jets to climb the creek to spawn.
The spawners are why the area is good this time of year. The rainbows are itching to do the deed, and spawn in great numbers up in the creek. They have to steel themselves for the trip, however, so the fat, healthy, strong fish that aren't quite ready wait in the river in deep water, waiting for rain or warmer water or just the overwhelming urge to meet attractive trout of the opposite sex. Once they're in the creek they're safe, because the creeks are sensibly closed to protect them while they do their business. In the big river, they're concentrated even more than they would be due to the cold (which explains the cutts, browns, and whitefish in the same spot), but fishing for them won't hurt the spawn any because the fish aren't on redds yet. Indeed, some of the fish I caught were in six feet of water, not exactly your stereotypical spawning gravel.
Anyway, back to the fishing. It started off slow. Contract guide Don McCue was planning to fish with me but realized a prior committment after we were already parked at the access point, so he just came down to watch me catch a few, wearing ditch boots to wade through the snow and the (fragile and rotting) ice shelves. I had to disappoint him by catching nothing, first by fishing a streamer/dropper combo downstream from then on a Matt's Black Stone trailing a Bead, Hare, and Copper. Score after half an hour was one foul-hooked rainbow. Boo.
After Don left, I kept fishing the double nymph rig up to the mouth of the creek. The sun peaked out from the clouds, and in fifteen minutes I caught four fish, including the reason no pictures accompany this story: the best fish of the day, an 18" male cutt-bow hybrid, turned out to be camera shy and so flopped his tail against my lens right as I was preparing to snap a snazzy close-up shot. I had my good DSLR, not the cheap waterproof Pentax I could just dunk in the river to clean, so photos were out of the question. It took me twenty minutes after I got home to clean the slime off my lens. Jeez, fish. I promise I wasn't going to eat you.
I lost my flies a few casts after the nice bow, then tied on a Matt's Golden Stone above a new Rubberleg Hare and Copper, a pattern I did for the shop for the first time this year. The sun was as bright as it got during the two hours I fished, and the fished seemed to like the illusion of warmth it gave. That or the sparkle off the stonefly's abdomen and the Rubberleg's thorax. Long story short, in the eddy I was death from above on rainbows, cutts, and whitefish for about twenty minutes. I got some more nice fish, including two in the 15-17" range, and most of the trout were chunky and powerful. Then the clouds rolled in again, it started to fitfully flurry, and the switch was thrown. I think I got fish on back to back casts, then didn't get another strike in the next half hour, including another hopeful run up to the creek mouth where the fish hadn't seen the Golden Stone/Rubberleg combo. Nothing doing. By now it was late afternoon, the 38 degree water was starting to get to me, and I started hankering for a cup of hot tea followed by a beer. Such hankerings are not to be denied, so I headed home.
The facts:
Location: Yellowstone River, several miles downstream from Gardiner.
Time: 3:00-5:00PM.
Weather: 35-40 degrees, overcast to partly cloudy, occasional flurries.
Water temp: damn cold.
Water clarity: 3-4 feet in main flow of river, 4-5 feet before the creek water had time to mix.
Fish caught: 10-12 trout, from 8-18 inches, 4 whitefish from 8-12 inches.
Top flies: Matt's Golden Stone, Rubberleg Hare and Copper, Bead Hare and Copper. No known eats on the Matt's Black Stone or the Black Love Bunny.
Hi, my name is Doug Korn, I'm a guide for PFS shop during the fishing season and tie flies for the shop during the winter back home here in New York. Well the other day I had a chance to get out and fish for some of our local brown trout on Oatka Creek. The creek was high and fast but I did manage to take some fine browns on one of Matt's #14 Bead Hare and Coppers that work so well out West... Well I guess they work here too! 