Clark Fork River - May 6, 2011

Today was a very good day on the Clark Fork River in the St. Regis, Montana area. Actually I am surprised it was as good as it was, since the river is in its first stages of the spring snow melt and the river is going to be totally blown out in a matter of a day or two. But, even with the rising water the fishing was very good.
Brooks Sanford of the Clark Fork Trout & Tackle shop and I hit the water at around 8:30 am. The clouds were fairly thick, keeping the sun away most of the day. I started off nymphing, a Pat's Rubber Legs and a San Juan Worm. The worm caught the first fish. Then it was hit and miss for a while, until we finally just put on two of the Pat's Rubber Legs flies. The previous day I had had 8 fish to the boat by noon, today I had a lot more, like around 16. We had gone back to the Pats and a red San Juan Worm variation and they both were catching fish.
After lunch we had hoped that the hatch of Skwalla stoneflies would happen but we never really saw many Skwallas. There were some March Browns, more Gray Drakes and a few BWO's but not much else. We tried dry flying and caught a few trout but mostly it was very quiet so we went back to nymphing. The last hour I brought out the dry fly rod and fished with double dry Skwalla flies. That last hour of fishing produced a lot of fish.
The largest trout of the day was a measured 19.5 inch CuttBow. I caught many Rainbows, Cutthroats, CuttBows and some Whitefish. In total, today I caught 37 fish, almost twice what I had caught the day before. Many of those trout were in the 16 to 18 inch range. Overf the period of the two days I fish, I caught 5 different generations of trout. The river has a very healthy population of fish.
Yep, again it was a good day on the Clark Fork. Now the river is going into the spring flood and I will have to wait for the waters to lower back down to their summer levels then I can come back to this great river, the Clark Fork River.
Larry ---sagefisher---