A Great Day

 Noah and Ashton and I packed some snacks and our fishing stuff and took a drive over to the Gallatin River near Belgrade today.  We brought our 5 month old yellow lab Jax.  We hiked up river from the access about a mile to a nice deep run that I remembered from last summer.  We have had some very warm temperatures for this time of year (it got up to 60 this week!) and the river was flowing very good.  

This particular fishing spot brought back memories of a wonderful day last summer when I took all 3 of my kids to this spot and spent a great afternoon.  The kids played in the sand and splashed in the water.  They caught a handful of minnows from a shallow pool.  We ate lunch and I even had time to catch a fish or two out of the deep pool.  The sad part is that i actually caught my biggest fish of last summer from this run...an 18 inch whitefish.  Needless to say last summer wasn't a good one for large trout.

Back to the present.  Our "secret spot" looked very different than it had in August.  The sand bar was nothing but a sheet of snow and ice and the pool itself was crowded by a thick ice shelf that shrunk the river by at least half.  Despite these changes, the spot was still very fishable and by standing on the ice it was an easy cast and drift to get the flys to where the fish were.  

Noah brought his spinning rod rigged up with nymphs and a casting bobber.  I tried a few different small nymphs with no success.  I then tied on a small red san juan worm tied from very ultra chennile on a size 16 hook.  I raised the indicator to well over the depth of the water and placed a small split shot above the fly.  I wanted to make sure I was on the very bottom.

On the first cast, I watched the indicator jig as the fly bounced on the gravel bottom and then it suddenly disappeared.  A few seconds later I had landed a 10 inch rainbow.  Ah ha! I thought.  I tied the same fly on for Noah and we both began catching fish.  By the time we had finished we had pulled 8 fish out of this one run, the biggest being a nice brown of about 15 inches (a decent fish for the Gallatin).  This of course does not include the fat sucker that Noah snagged off the bottom of the river.

We returned to the truck at about 4:00 p.m.  Just a wonderful day on the river with the kids.