South Fork Snake River, ID

i would hardly rate that day as poor. i also caught a 12 inch brown. i will do my log later of the same trip. i will emphasize von hansen's excellent rowing skills at the end of the day. and avoiding meat bees.

Hmm, I'm still giving it a poor rating fishing-wise. For as much good water as I fished and as few fish as I caught (especially for such a famed river), it was poor. The trip itself was excellent, however.

I'm very disappointed in this fishing trip. What the hell happened?

Good question. It took us a day+ to start figuring out the river, talking to guys who were doing better than us. We started doing okay on chernobyl patterns on top (at least getting more looks) but never got anything dialed. There were no good hatches to bring fish up consistently. And the water seemed fairly high and moving fast.

That's just not right. Unacceptable. Poor numbers and poor size compared to what that river is capable of.

The river should be dropping this time of year since they don't need to release all the water for irrigation like they do during the summer. Even with the high water, weren't there gravel bars, side channels, etc. that were fishable?

Did you try casting wooly buggers or super renegades from the boat right into the bank and pulling them back over drop off points at all? A lot of floaters catch a lot of fish that way.

I completely agree. I had different expectations for that river than what happened, though. Since it's such a blue ribbon fishery, I was thinking it would be more like the Owyhee or SF Boise, and there would be great hatches and pods of big fish stacked up rising. Not the case.

I didn't try woolly buggers, but I did try a Clouser and maybe one other streamer. It drew a little interest but not much. One of the other floaters got a lot of looks to his streamer (don't remember what it was) but not many hookups.

There were gravel bars, islands, side channels that were better fishing than the main channel. The problem is the first day we floated all through that stuff without stopping since we didn't know how to guage how far we had floated, or how quickly we were floating. We did a better job the second/third days of stopping frequently to fish good spots.

It was a first pass at a river that fished a lot differently than I was expecting. And 2 1/2 days of fishing it wasn't enough to get dialed in on anything, especially since there weren't any strong hatches to work.