Salmon Trout Steelheader 1984
Scallawagglers, aka RapalicasIt wasn't freezing but it was cold enough to make my fingers stiff, and the fishing was lousy. There were three of us: my wife Adele, my friend Randy, and me. We were drifting a deep, narrow, brush choked stretch of river near the three forks of the Missouri River at Logan Montana. We had been fishing hard for nearly two hours without a single strike. 
It was early in November. The farmers had closed their irrigation ditches for the year, bringing the water level up a good four or five inches higher than in October. Despite an intensely bright sun and a cloudless sky, the river looked and felt like winter because a heavy wet snow storm had stripped the cottonwoods and the willows of their last remaining leaves. There were long feathery plumes of snow blowing off the peaks of the Tobacco Root Mountains to the west. The water was cold, a little off color, and fast. It was clear that the fish would be lying in deep water, and that dry fly fishing was totally out of the question. After the first two hours of drifting the river, it seemed that wet flies were out of the question too. We were throwing so much lead we had to duck our heads as we cast. Randy had been fishing a Royal Wulff for the last ten or fifteen minutes. He said it was more fun to get skunked on a dry fly than to get skunked slinging lead. It was my turn to fish. I tied on a big Count Down Rapala I had pulled off a bush on the Beaverhead River earlier in the year. Randy, a dry fly purist at heart, made a sickly face when he saw what I was up to. My first lob-cast hit the water with a splash, followed by four or five feet of fly line coiled over the spot where the lure hit the water. I pulled in the slack line as fast as I could. Rather than dragging against the current and pulling straight up to the surface as our weighted nymphs and streamers had, the diving-bill caught the current and wiggled down into about four or five feet of water, deeper than we had been able to fish all day. Boom, just a few seconds into the first cast and I had on a beautiful 18 inch male brown trout, still in its darkest spawning colors. Another cast brought another fish, then a missed strike, and then another fish. In a dozen casts I netted and released six fish, all brown trout over sixteen inches long! There was a large, foam covered eddy behind a cottonwood sweeper coming into view. I was waiting for just the right moment to cast when Randy suddenly jumped up from the rower's seat, threw his arms around me and started yelling at me to give him the rod. I thought he was trying to stop me from catching any more fish with the Rapala, so I made one last desperate cast with Randy bear- hugging me and reaching for the rod. The lure landed in the cottonwood roots, and my fly line snapped off at the leader knot. I told Randy he'd been overzealous in defending the purity of fly-fishing. Actually he'd been overcome in a moment of weakness. "I wanted to fish with the Rapala," he said. I sat down and took over the oars while Randy practiced casting with a white-winged dry fly of some kind. Someone else might have decided to buy a spinning rod and box full of lures, but I like to fish with a fly rod. It was clear: I needed to figure out how to make lightweight divers...divers I could more easily cast with a fly rod. |
Lure Flies/
Scallawaggler/
Halfords Ghost/
Ponzi Fish/
Watusi Worms/
Spinner Blades/