5 Tips for Missouri River August Success
- Go early. Early bird gets the worm. First to fish is a good plan. If you think about warfare and the tactics that never fall from favor, you will understand. If you like to win, go early.
- Fish like oxygen. Higher water temperatures hold less oxygen. Riffles hold more oxygen. Find moving water. Fish moving water.
- Fish learn. If you like to teach your (rising) fish rapidly, drag the fly over the head of the trout. Do it, the dragging part, the first few casts to increase the learning curve. Fish learn. The surprise attack is a tactic in warfare that does not fall out of style. Drag free drifts fool trout.
- Fish will eat terrestrials early in the day. Ants, beetles, and hoppers. You don’t have to wait til the afternoon to feed fish hoppers.
Squeaky Oar Lock’s Wedding Buffet Theory. You are tricked did not have an excuse lined up into attending some lame ass wedding your wife wants to to attend; you sleep through the ceremony arriving pretty snoozy at the reception. You get in line and are served up a dry overcooked shredded slice of roast beef with cold burnt au-jus. The good news is there is 46 more pounds of the scorched roast beef.
But as you are choosing between the wilted underdressed spinach salad and the tepid a bit watery Ambrosia Salad you see a salted yet carefully aged ham.
Ohhhhh, yes.
Same feeling that the trout have. 10 gazillion Trico Spinners drifting over their head. Analogous to the dried out roast beef.
A tasty red ant happens by the same fish. Yessir. Tasty salty sweet ham.
The last tip? Enjoy your day. Enjoy your friends, your family, the water. Fishing is fun. Enjoy it.
3 Comments.
Stunning pic. I wanna be this guy.
Straight Lines … Inspired By the Dean of the Missouri Dry Fly Dreams
“I don’t always want things to go straight”…simple words stated assertively and without pretense as we slowly drift downstream on a moving ribbon of clear blue looking glass, filled with illusions and internal promises of complete impunity from life’s pain and noise…
The meaning is intended to help wire and connect my eyes and mind, to visually discern the perfect intended path of a #20 BWO emerger pattern, whose profile and movement upon the reflective surface of moving water in front of me suggests a delicate innocence, as if dancing or hitch hiking upon a slate blue cloud… all the while carrying out the bad intent of deceiving precisely targeted, yet somehow unseen but omnipresent, objects of my desires…
But a deeper message has been intimated through this caring and impassioned voice, and it lingers assuredly evoking empathy within me…
These simple words are now on replay, and are repeated within my mind like a childhood ride on a merry-go-round, in a hushed and whispered tone, yet almost too loud to bare; as if an attempt to keep its true meaning a secret conveyed only to me, yet never promised not to be spoken and shared with others…
Success on this river, as on all spring creeks in which past sojourns have filled me with hope and desire, measured by those moments in which time has no relative meaning, string theory is understood, and the colors of a rainbow suddenly and covertly appear below my fly, requires more than mere attention and focus upon the easy to see and predictable challenges of life’s main current seams…
To attract and maintain the interest of such an elusive and beautiful object, like the attainment and retention of true peace, layered within humility and joy, requires the deepest commitment to patience, and an understanding that mere will of force, nor success measured by money or fame, have any place of importance here; where time is measured by the number of memories recalled and tears summoned by those we have previously lost…
Inter-tangled like spaghetti noodles lying upon a dinner plate, are in fact countless unseen micro-currents, seemingly always inexplicably laid out between me and a disappearing proof of life ring, left by a rise that has caught the entirety of my caring and attention; leaving both my body and mind begging for more, like the fleeting moment years ago when I first captured my wife’s shy yet assertive blue eyes not looking away…
All such micro-currents act as barriers to attaining that which I so badly seek and desire to attain, if even for a brief moment…to connect with something that’s beauty has not been corrupted, nor used in a manner that defines success or failure…
Would the lifetime commitment of a spouse resonating the truest and purest love, or the grandest moments in our lives, or our children’s lives, be as valued, perhaps not even identified nor felt, if life were filled with only straight lines and nothing but good and certainty?
Experience teaches us over time, that otherwise unseen micro-currents will always be present, and like the view of blue skies above which may at times be obstructed from clouds, flawless blue skies will always return with the exhaling of patience and understanding, always engendering a deeper hold on those who have chosen a path of kindness and love …
That was lovely. Thank you for sharing those thoughts, so well expressed.