... is really big and really deep. See for yourself, Warren. Just click on the pic.



Virtually every fish shown in the slide show was caught using a thread furled leader with about 3-4' of tippet, ranging from 4X to 2X. During runoff, I averaged somewhere around 15 fish in hand per outing.

After runoff, I continued to fish it, under more docile conditions, but it is still a big river and pretty deep in most of the places that hold the nice fishies. When things settled down, the average number in hand was probably well over 20 per day.

The thing is, I'm talking dry fly fishing and you may well be thinking about wets or nymphs. The dries were mostly my FEB salmonflies, golden stones, and hoppers, but I did get down to size 16 caddis and size 18 midges and bwos, still fished with the same basic leader and tippet set up. Sixty days of dry fly fishing from late May to mid November with the same set up. You can do the math on how many fish weren't much bothered by clearly visible light colored leaders with short tippets to the fly.

The other thing is, I only fish to dumb, nearsighted, and color blind fish. Well, actually, I do fish to some Ph.D. fish, too, with the same kind of rig, but I'm too dumb to know that that is what they are.

There's this little spring creek down in SE Idaho, a tributary to the South Fork of the Snake called somebody's No Tell'um that reportedly holds some of those Ph.D. browns and Snake River cutthroats. I don't much like fishing there, but when I did I fished thread furled leaders with short tippets and ordinary flies and caught some of those dumb educated fish. Just my luck.

John