Tim floated the bow again today with us and his LL Bean film crew. We stopped to fish a run right out of the gates and Tim hooked 2 very nice bow river fish right off the bat and we lost both of them. We then started floating again and hooked and landed a few nice fish but lost another nice fish.
Next we pulled into a bank I've seen a big brown on and had great dry fly fishing on before the Monday rains and water release. While we were looking for snouts the big brown shows up right in front of us free floating backwards downstream, blowing our cover some 35' below where I had been seeing him. That was in all likelihood well over 25", exactly the size fish we wanted to put on camera and now he was spooked. We worked our way up the bank and cast the hopper dropper through the shallow seams. 3 casts each, then we switched. On my 2nd set I hooked a nice 20+" brown that I got a good hookset on, a nice jump out of and then he screamed across the river for deeper water. Everything looked like it was going great and then the line went slack…my knot gave…I couldn't believe it especially after the spiel I'd given Tim on the loop knot holding 100% of the line strength. I don't know what happened, all I do know is that knot does hold100% line strength, but the knot in question did not and we lost another great bow river fish we wanted on camera.
The day seemed to be jinxed as the next stop we lost 8 fish, 6 of which were solid bow river fish that would've represented the health of this fishery. I was starting to get really stressed as I couldn't have had a better caster in the boat, and we were even hooking good fish, both of us, and we just kept losing one fish after another. How could we lose so many fish??? While eating lunch I made a few casts hooked a gorgeous rainbow we were about to get underwater footage on and then I lost it within inches of the net…..ridiculous.
We stopped earlier in the evening to look for snouts and rising fish and found several more. The first bank had a nice brown coming up but when we pulled over there was no longer a snout to be found. The next bank had several big fish feeding on it so we got out again and setup on the bank. The camera guys were getting a time lapse on the sunset while we watched the trout feeding in rhythm. Just before we started casting another boat came through and cast streamers right into the bank we were standing on spooking all the fish. There were 6 of us (Tim, myself, 2 camera men, 2 guide for the camera boats and 1 sound guy and 3 boats anchored) all on the bank and they fished right through the water putting all the fish off the bank…it drives me nuts, if you went to a golf course and didn't practice any etiquette you'd be banned for life and not only did they mess up the bank for us but they were arrogant enough to make a comment about it. During a time when the fishing for rising trout had been very tough we had an opportunity to showcase several very large (including one brown in the 24+" range) bow river fish where people would be able to see the true quality of our bow river fish…at what point has common courtesy left our daily practice?