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Fishing Recreation
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08 Sep 2009, 10:25 am / Other
The South Fork of the Boise River has been on a steady decline with water levels and it is right now at the optimum level to catch fish. All summer long the water was hovering at 1800cfs, which makes wade fishing almost non existent. Dry Fly Innovations took a personal day on Friday the 4th to see if the rumors were correct about the water levels dropping. It was true, the water was flowing at 600cfs and it looked gorgeous. We decided to head to the bottom of the South Fork where it flows into the bottom end of Arrow Rock Reservoir.
In typical Nate Brumley fashion we decided to walk down River from the truck about a mile maybe more to fish virgin waters. After we walked the mile plus we found a beautiful stretch of water that should have held fish, but the kicker is you can never fish the easy side with dad. So we started to cross the river and let me tell you it is not easy even when it is flowing at 600cfs, and it is bone chilling cold. When Dry Fly Innovations fishes the bottom end we never wear waders because it is too far to walk in waders, so lucky us we were wading in shorts all day. Cold!!!
When we reached our destination I started with a cricket (#12) and dad had a Bullet Head Hopper (#12). We started throwing these flies and wading up in the river, but the vegetation has not started that far down on the river so there were no hoppers or any bugs. It did not take long to see that we were to far down river to do any good so we started fishing up river quickly in pursuit of a new stretch of water that had vegetation and some sort of bug hatch. By this time it was around 1 pm and the big bugs just were not getting enough attention so we decided to change up flies.
I had put on an Elk Hair Caddis (#16) and dad put on a Black gold (#16) and on about the second or third cast wham a rainbow smacked my caddis and the fight was on. It was a nice little rainbow about 14 or 15" and heavy. These fish that are coming out of Arrow Rock are fat and healthy. After I released the fish we started fishing again and it was about 20 minutes later I had another fish on my line. At this point dad realized that black gold was not cutting the mustard and he tied on a brown olive CDC Caddis and started throwing that at the fish. We fished down on the lower waters until about 3pm and caught 2 fish.
After lunch we drove up river to another hole and of course we needed cross the water and we began fishing upriver. Dad snuck in down river to see if there were any fish at where the creek comes in and he tossed his black CDC Caddis and in seconds he had a nice rainbow on the line. He landed that fish and threw his line back and in matter of minutes he picked up another nice rainbow. At about 4:30 or 5 pm there was a nice hatch of PMD Mayflies and the surface of the water was alive with fish. We immediately saw what the fish were feeding on so we switched up flies to our PMD up right wing Mayfly and started picking off feeding rainbows systematically one at a time. It was a great run of fishing with our mayfly, but the hatch was short lived it only lasted about an hour and then the fish were down. At this point we ended our day with a CDC Caddis Green and Black Biot (#18). We caught four more fish before dark with the caddis flies and then it was time to wade the river and head to the truck.
We ended up the day catching 15 nice beautiful trout and 3 squaw fish. The bottom end of the South Fork is fishing funny in terms of hatches and bugs. There is not a whole lot of vegetation so the fishing has not started yet. The fish have no reason to come up river because there is no food. We are still about a week or little more from awesome fishing; as soon as the vegetation gets on the lower end of the river the big patterns and the fishing will be dynamite. (hoppers, crickets, and humpy's) All I can say is that a slow day of fly fishing is better than sitting in the office talking about fly fishing, and that is a fact!
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Fishing Recreation
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