Wild Weather Again

Over the past few days, I've seen a very mixed bag of fishing results on the Snake River. Monday and Tuesday brought us some beautiful early fall weather, with bright sun, calm winds and pleasant temperatures. Both days also saw lackluster fishing. I had good anglers from Deadman's to Moose each of those days, and we saw a lot of smaller fish on a variety of dry flies, with just a few larger fish acting very shy. I awoke Wednesday to some good cloud cover and fairly warm temps; I headed to Moose to put in and run the 14 mile stretch to Wilson with San Francisco resident Tom Steele. We hammered them. He fished a Parachute Hare's Ear from Moose all the way down to Wilson, and we found nice fish all over the place. Even though there was not much of a hatch, the fish were eagerly looking up. I think they were looking for the Drake hatch, and our fly did the trick. I decided to try it again today. Again, we awoke to good cloud cover, and slightly cooler temps. We put on at Moose and found a few fish, but before we knew it, the skies opened up with rain and sleet. The thermometer dropped to the low 40's and we began to freeze. The wind began gusting toward the 30 mile an hour mark. One storm after another rolled in on us, and my clients opted to row out to Wilson and head home. We cherry-picked a few holes on the way down, and found a couple of fish on small dries. I think if we had stuck with it, the fishing would have produced again. At one point, the clouds lifted a bit, and we could see that some significant snow had fallen above about 8,000 feet. It's pouring rain tonight, and it's still quite cold. We'll see what tomorrow brings. This weekend is the 25th annual Jackson Hole One Fly event. Forty teams will compete on the Snake and South Fork this weekend with one fly per angler, per day. Good luck! I'll have more on this after the weekend. Here's a couple of pictures of my buddy Larry Stephenson, who I guided last week. We had a great day looking for Cutties on dries. After visiting me here, he headed up to Oregon chasing Deschutes River Steelhead. Here's a picture he sent me from his trip...what a fish!! Check out Larry's link off of my list below to see his great artwork. More soon.