Across the river a trout is happily filling his belly with bugs.
Perhaps one of the more challenging and rewarding trout to chase is the golden. I remember as a teenager backpacking into the Beartooth Mountains and deliberately passing on some of the lakes we knew held goldens. They were brutal hikes to say the least. I am happy Dana accepted the challenge and chased those beautiful fish, and am grateful to her for sharing her knowledge and experiences on the podcast.
My introduction to the river hid me from home waters nearly all my life. I grew up in Washington State visiting Montana on vacation with my family. When I was old enough, I worked on a cattle ranch in Montana on the Stillwater River. My father taught me how to read a river and how to track deer and elk, and how to be quiet in the woods. After high school, I went to school in Colorado and learned to fly fish on the South Platte and Big Thompson Rivers. Fly fishing was a cold trout stream in the Rocky Mountains. But it did not have to be.
On the surface Phil’s experience on the Dream Stream and my own seems anything but similar. Phil Tereyla is a professional fly fishing guide, born and raised in Colorado, who loves targeting big brown trout on the Dream Stream section of the South Platte River. My time fishing the Dream Stream was twenty years ago, as a beginner fly fisher going to school in Colorado, who was more concerned with catching ANY fish, let alone big browns. But the Dream Stream gave us both something very much the same. A challenge. And a hope for a great fish, that could only be caught by embracing that challenge.
I had caught several fish already. Fishing was good. A size 16 pheasant tail with a zebra midge dropper. Most of the takes were on the midge. It renewed my confidence in this confidence fly, and in the idea that my fly mattered far less than the rest of it. My casts were landing softly. My drifts were sliding smoothly. The fly line flowed evenly with the indicator and my hooksets were effective. It all felt right. I was in the groove.
I knew in the time I walked the ten feet from my dorm room stairwell in Sijan Hall to his blue Land Rover that my day on the river would be cold.
Carp fishing and permit fishing are extremely similar. If you had told me this before speaking with Justin, I would never have believed you. After talking with him, I am convinced. Of course it is not exactly the same, but if your living far from the ocean, chasing carp may scratch the itch. Justin's enthusiasm is contagious and this episode is one of the deepest dives we have had on the Wadeoutthere Podcast into all the intricate details that can bring success while fly fishing for any species.