Being from the Northeast, I’m a stereotype as one of the many Catskill anglers that heads west every year to the Missouri River to dry fly fish as the river enters its prime season in or around July 4th on a normal year, while the Eastern rivers begin to slow down and hit the summer doldrums. My dad and I first heard about the Missouri River while fishing an evening hatch on the Delaware in August of 2003. The fishing was slow that night and both us and an angler we shared the pool with knew it was going to be a dark-thirty event at best. So we started talking. The guy we were talking to had spent several summers over the recent prior years on the Missouri and told us if we wanted to head west, that was where we should go. Being a time that smart phones with quality photos didn’t exist, we just took his word for it. He gave us the name of the guide he used, and we called him when winter set in that same 2003 year. We reserved a few guide days with him, and left 4 days open where we planned on fishing on our own to learn the river.
We went out in Mid July to the Missouri in 2004, which was stated to be “prime time” by all we spoke with after that evening hatch conversation. When we arrived, things were going as planned when it came to the Missouri’s seasonal progression. Tricos were coming off daily in the mornings in prolific fashion, and provided steady dry fly action until around noon-1pm. The evenings were a mix of leftover PMDS’s, some caddis, and fish rising to junk in the film that likely included every in between stage of the above insects you could imagine. While the targets were there every day in numbers we had never seen back east, our success was relatively poor. We were surrounded by rising fish everywhere we went, but only hooked and landed a few fish a day. Given what we had seen in terms of surface activity, the results were underwhelming. Particularly when we had headed west as “Delaware Anglers”, the place where “if you can catch fish there, you can catch fish anywhere.”
That first trip was enough to let me know I was missing something when it came to my approach on the river, but not enough time to let me figure out what I was doing wrong. That would come later in the next few years that followed. I applied to, and later attended Montana State University in the fall of 2006 where fishing the Missouri became a regular opportunity that was available to me. And given the fact that the immediate fishing in Bozeman involved a lot of western run and gun blind fishing, ridiculous attractors like the purple haze and chubby, and limited hatch point and shoot dry fly opportunities, I was happy as a born and raised Delaware angler to regularly make the 2 hr drive to fish the Mo. That fall season on the Mo revealed to me how the fall fishing was different than summer prime, but also allowed me to better learn the river. I fished it hard as summer lingered on and off up through give or take early October, and then into the true fall time period until straight up winter set in. This time taught me the first important lesson when it came to dry fly fishing the Mo- that lesson being where you spend your time on fish matters. There are rising trout everywhere on the river when the bugs are coming off. But there are fish, or groups of fish that make sense to fish to during those time periods. Other groups should be ignored and passed on when the water type, drift, or set up prevents efficient coverage from being possible.
While I transferred out of Montana State the winter of 2006, the impact the river had on me stayed. My dad and I made the Mo an annual summer trip from 2006 moving forward. It took between 2-4 years to become familiar with the habits of the Mo’s trout and what was important to prioritize when it came to targeting them on the surface. And 15 years later, not much has changed in terms of what remains important from a dry fly standpoint. Sure, some years certain hot flies aren’t working and other new hot flies emerge, perhaps a spot you could always rely on a few big browns holding in just isn’t holding them on a given year, but generally, the rules remain the same and have not changed. These are those rules:
TIME MANAGEMENT AND SETTING UP ON THE RIGHT FISH
It cannot be stressed enough how important it is to select the right fish during the times surface activity is going off on the Mo. This is easier said than done for an angler that has only fished the river a few times, let alone someone experiencing the place for the first time. The surface activity is overwhelming. You get to the river and there may be fish rising within 10 feet of your boat at the ramp, they are in back eddies, barely existent back channels, you name it. These fish are not the opportunities you should focus on in most cases, but rather are time traps and are likely to lead to frustration.
The fish you are looking for on the Mo are the fish that are in a clean drift. By clean drift I mean in as uniform current as possible (some current speed and limited micro currents that impact the drift)…. No swirly back eddies or currents that provide drift issues. Micro currents are always a thing on the Mo, but you can limit the impact they have by being choosy on the water you fish. You want uniform currents and clean drifts where you can present the fly drag free as often as possible. Fish in these lies also tend to stay put as much as can be expected from a Missouri River trout, that tend to weave in between one another as they have an almost orchestrated pecking order that evolves in lock step with the hatch you are fishing. A fish in a fixed position is an easier target that a fish moving in a slow to perhaps no current lie, making it hard to know whether you are covering the fish at all.
The first day you fish the Mo is often an exercise of identifying which uniform drift areas are holding fish based on the flow and year at hand. You take a few fish on that day, but more so should be just taking mental notes of what runs/. pools present areas and situations worth targeting on the days to come on your trip. And you stick to those areas on the coming days.
As I’ve written on before, the insistence on floating can sometimes hurt rather than help an angler. With a drift boat comes the natural impatience of “lets see what’s going on in the pool below” and fishing too quickly/passing up quality opportunities. When you isolate an area that has a lot of fish holding there and rising consistently on a day to day basis, consider if its possible to get there on foot. And if the answer is yes, consider doing that. This allows you to lock in there and fully lock in the drift/approach to the fish there, which can take a day or two when considering light/glare, angle/general approach that comes with that pool holding fish. The boat is a tool to get to certain spots, and you should know the spots you plan on stopping at after day 2 or 3 of your trip. Keeping an open mind and reacting to what you see each day doesn’t mean you are free spirited on the very predictable Missouri River over the course of any given week. It just means you aren’t paying attention and getting smarter each day.
FLY SELECTION:
Looking back at that first 2004 trip to the Missouri River, my biggest mistake that I made was trying to match the hatch. In the case of that trip, trying to match the trico hatch. The worst mistake. The Missouri River’s trout are technical and selective, but have vulnerability when it comes to certain patterns and flies. The river itself is not a river that has diverse bug life, in fact it only really has 5 major hatches over the course of the entire year that include (1) midges (2) olives (3) pmds (4) caddis (5) tricos. Summer prime involves primarily the later 3 hatches.
Rather than focus on what the fish are eating, I over time started to focus on the way the fish was rising and then tailored my fly selection of relevant but different fishy low profile patterns that suited the rise of the fish I was fishing to. The Missouri when it has a hatch doesn’t just have a nice amount of duns coming down and fish eating them, it has a flood of food that enters the film and drift generally, with adults being seen on the surface as well. This is why you are likely to see almost any fish you are casting to “sharking” in the hopefully uniform drift you are fishing as they eat 7-10 items in the film or below for every 2-3 dries they take for the hell of it in between off the actual surface. You see more backs and tails, rather than heads when fishing the Missouri. These fish don’t want to eat adults off the surface, but you can entice them to take yours by sticking to established fish catchers on the surface. Because the fish on the Mo are so film oriented and rarely eating off the surface, I find trying to match the hatch precisely is a poor strategy. I want to stand out with something slightly different and trigger them to take a dry off the surface, not blend with a ton of adults that are rarely getting eaten. The above makes trying to “match the hatch” an ineffective strategy, and often causes match the hatch anglers to overcomplicate things on the river.
First, there are too many of the real thing around your fly to try and mimic and blend with that. All you do is blend and likely are identified as a fraud during the process. The goal during an intense surface event on the Mo is to fish a buggy, low floating pattern that is reasonable out there, but different enough that it stands out to the fish as its coming by with a dozen other potential food options at the same time. Several patterns have proven themselves over time to be these types of flies that the fish tend to respond to. They include (1) the cornfed caddis and other buggy caddis patterns (2) the buzzball that represents dead bug matter generally and invented by the fishiest garbage fly creator Gary Lafontaine if you have your doubts (3) Quigley’s cripples in both PMD/OLIVE (4) Spinners/Cripples Generally …shout out to the smokejumper (5) Small terrestrials and ant patterns- particularly during the trico hatch and (6) Griffiths gnats 14-16. These flies set you apart from the mass of the real thing coming down, but are also not absurd for a fish to see during the summer prime. This allows you to get fish to pick and react to your fly more often. This point serves as a good transition to the method and manner that you cover the fish you are fishing to on the Mo, which is more of a math problem than it is about delicacy. Blame your fly less than you want to on this river, any of the above will take almost any rising fish you are casting to at any given time during summer prime. Blame your tippet less as well, as 4x gets it done every year, including this low water year, with the exception of a few fish in especially tough scenarios where 4.5 trouthunter is reluctantly pulled out. And while I can end with the cliché “presentation…presentation…presentation….” I wont. Its tempo and efficient coverage, which requires its own section.
Accurate Casting, Short Drifts, Repeat
So you have a group of good fish in a somewhat uniform current/lane and there are a lot of bugs on the water, but you are smart enough to not match them exactly and have a cornfed caddis on even though you don’t see any caddis on the water. You have made a few casts that were right over the fish, but he didn’t eat it. You think “maybe they aren’t on the caddis” forgetting why you have the cornfed caddis on in the first place. You KNOW they aren’t eating the caddis at 11am on July 15th, they are eating tricos, but you are throwing the caddis because they’ve seen them, the fly floats well enough, and the fish in front of you has 5000 tricos over its head at any given time. But the fish hasn’t eaten your cornfed caddis. Why?
The likely issue is the time it is taking you to present the fly to the fish. Making a cast 8-10 feet above the fish, floating it down to the fish, letting it drift 5-10 feet below the fish because you don’t want to spook them, and then stripping all your line in to a comfortable starting length and the false casting again to repeat creates an efficiency problem. By doing this, you are getting 1-2 drifts over the fish per minute. That doesn’t make it when you are fishing to a fish that has a dozen food items in the same feeding window your fly is in at any given time your fly is in the edible zone of irritation as it passes over its head. That math doesn’t change whether you make an accurate cast or not. You are a 10% chance of being selected on any given drift based on the other food items in the same exact area of the drift your fly is in at that time it passes the fish. 5 good casts, means just a 10% chance 5 times in a row. This makes it critical to cover a fish that is feeding frequently as efficiently as possible to get takes. I try to land the fly 1-3 feet above the fish I am targeting both for purposes of efficiently shortening my drift time into the fish, and because I think landing it within the fish’s view sometimes causes the fish to notice it and pick it out. I often pick my fly back up when its 6’’-1 foot past the fish’s tail and try to repeat that same process. If you happen to spook the fish by doing this (which is not overly common) you likely have several other fish within casting distance to rotate on to next without moving at all. The risk of fishing this way is next to nothing aside from the case where you have a particularly large, standout fish that you add some caution into the approach for.
Its this important aspect of fishing the Mo that I feel many skilled dry fly anglers from the east fail to incorporate when fishing the Mo. They cover a fish with accurate casting but poor efficiency and then turn to fly selection as the variable they feel is the reason they are not getting strikes. They rotate between 10 pmd patterns on a fish tweaking body color, wing profile ,fly size, stage, landing all of them 8 feet above the fish and taking a delicate dry fly approach to the fish covering them at most 2x/minute. The issue is not the fly, it’s the inefficiency and time you are taking to present to the fish each time even assuming the casting is accurate and presentation is on point. Put it right above their nose and rip it up right after it’s past their tail. Cover them repeatedly and often until they slip up and take your fly.
Sticking to the same fish can also be hard on the Mo. You can at times have 10-25 fish rising all within casting range at the same time in front of you. While its impossible during a time your trying to grind one out and having a tough go to focus solely on one fish, its important to try and limit your scattered casting. Focus on the rise forms and the fish that are most steady, and staying in the same place.
THEY’RE ALL GOOD BUT SOME ARE BETTER
A final thing to think about on the Mo is targeting the better fish in the river. In a river like the Missouri, the average fish size is very high at around 18-19’’ on a good year during summer prime. But there are better fish in the mix all the time in the 22-25’’ range. You see these heads in the mix and know you just saw a better fish than the rest, but often times you rationalize why the fish in front of you is a “nice” fish. Being disciplined enough and willing to raise your standards (which is why you came to the Missouri in the first place) on the fish you target is part of the growth process that comes with this sport if your goal is getting better. A deer hunter kills the first buck he sees on the first year that they go hunting. That same buck hunter doesn’t take the shot years later. Rather than rationalize why the target in front of you is the best use of your time, its important to watch and look for the fish that stands out in the group. Sometimes the other variables listed above that make it an ideal target also exist. That’s the fish you are looking for. And if you aren’t a little scared casting to the fish you are targeting, you’re setting your standards too low and its the wrong fish. Hunting big browns on the Mo is also its own little click and one that I personally subscribe to. You know them when you see them which requires avoiding pods and looking for isolated rising fish that just have that look that its not a rainbow. No bulging rises or weaving in and out sharking activity. Just the sneaky snout. That’s what I’m there for.
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