Pacemaker Fishing Forum

This past weekend, my dad and I met in Seattle, hopped a puddle jumper to Glacier Park International Airport, and began a three day fly fishing excursion on the beautiful rivers of Northwest Montana. On Friday afternoon we fished a lower section of the Flathead River introducing us to the beautiful landscape, crystal clear glacial fed waters, and amazing trout population. We both needed to brush up on fly fishing and casting techniques, but all in all, we both landed a few fish and got the skunk out of the drift boat. While we didn't catch anything of notable size, we did get into some Cutthroat and Rainbow trout.

On Saturday we took a two hour drive south to the Clark Fork River which is not glacial fed and looks more like the Upper Potomac in water color (e.g. clear, but with a green/tan tint). The fishing there started out really fast and furious with lots of risers and a few landed. Unfortunately, that pattern did not hold for the entire day.  Maybe I will blame the fact that my dad brought a banana on the boat, though he insisted that he had never heard of the superstition or was superstitious. We saw a great population of trout, but for 10 hours of fishing, we only landed four fish. Again, nothing of size on this day, but we did get into our first hybrid or Cutbow Trout...I am sure you can guess which two trout species mated for this hybrid.

On Sunday, we stayed local to our lodging and this time fished the upper Flathead River. Again blessed by beautiful crystal clear water, amazing rock colors, and good fishing, we even had slightly better weather conditions to support our cause. It was cloudy with occasional showers and that definitely worked in our favor. The fishing on this day was by far the best and we landed nearly a dozen trout. I even got into a nice trophy Cutthroat that went about 17 inches...or about 7 inches longer than an average trout of that specie. We had good risers all day, plenty of misses, but plenty of landed fish to really close out our trip well.

We fished with guide Eric Flink and I will post his info to the recommended Charter Captains thread later on.

I will post pictures as soon as I get them loaded and they will include great landscape shots, bald eagles, a few fish, and overall sum up the peace, tranquility, and purity of NW Montana.

Aside from being away from my wife, dog, and baby to be, I came back way too soon!