08/01/2013
Last Saturday night my wife and I camped in the Little Belt mountains. Got up early and hit a nice trail down to Belt Creek for some breakfast and fishing. First of all, I learned a couple good lessons. 1) It's good to do something like this before you go on a real trip, because forgetting that canister of fuel for your backpacking stove really makes for a hungry morning. 2) I am a pretty awesome backpacker/woodsman. I blame it on an infatuation with fire as a child. I made a sweet rock fire pit with a built in oven for the fire and rock shelf for my MSR backpacking pot to boil water over in the dried up gravel part of the creek bed (can you say run-on sentence?) And voila!! Food for two very hungry folk. 3) I have the world's best wife! She hiked in for miles and didn't complain, even though all we had to eat was a half a power bar. Then she fell in love with me all over again when I patched up my forgotten fuel mistake and made her a breakfast of oatmeal and coffee.
After that it was off the races with the fly rod. I put on an ant/stonefly foam pattern with a hare's ear nymph dropper and worked my way up the creek. The second cast was from where I started and bam! Hooked up a nice 12" Cutthroat. Worked my way up, continually hitting riffles and the bank edge where the water was deeper. Wasn't getting much more action on the flies I was using, so I switched to just a yellow bodied stimulator. Couple casts later Godzilla erupted out of the water and ate my fly. Ok, ok, so it was just a 12" rainbow, but dang you would have thought he hadn't eaten in a month! Put him back in the water and worked my way up to an awesome area with beautiful pools. I caught a couple more rainbows, and had a big fish take a look and false rise, then go back in. I thought to myself.. Hmmm, this could be awesome. But he didn't want any part of it. Got another Cutthroat up a little ways, and ran out of fishable water due to a boulder field. On my way back, I hit that hole again and couldn't believe it when the whale that lived in there ate my fly. I began stripping in, but as soon as I got my free line tight, I realized this wasn't going to work, he was just too big. The 12" fish were a piece of cake, but this fella was a different story. I worked to get my line on the reel, and as soon as I did, wouldn't you know it, he popped my leader. Stunned, I stood there looking at the piece of monofilament swaying in the breeze, thinking to myself, "well done grasshopper, well done." I learned a vital lesson that day. "Play the big fish". Don't just reel it in, but instead keep a tight line while letting him take a little if need be. I have no idea how big it was, I only ever saw his mouth and his shadow under the water. My guess is a nice size brown lives there. Maybe 15-16"? All I know is I'm gonna catch him again some day. ;) A couple 12 # Cutthroat later, and after only 2.5 hours of fishing I had caught more that I have caught all year. I went home very, very happy. A good day of fishing spent with my wife and a great experience. Man I love Montana!
