"Epic" is the second best word to describe the fishing Moss and I had over the past seven days in Montana. “Ridiculous” is just slightly more accurate.
The highlight (for me) was landing my biggest ever resident brown (just shy of 21”) on a hopper, on the Madison. A mauling not a slurp...with a few aerials. We were out on the water with Steve “Skinny” Mock of the Slide Inn - a ninja on the madison who spents part of his year chasing steelies in Oregon. My brown was not the biggest we tied into on the Madison (Moss and I both lost fish that looked significantly larger) it was the biggest we landed on the Madison. We also spent a day with Skinny throwing big nasty streamers using a jerk strip method Steve promotes with Kelly Galloup www.flyfisherman.com/skills/jsgalloupWhite generated the most follows, though a 7" inch articulated green streamer called the circus peanut yeiled the most heart stopping follows... Unfortunately, the largest fish we landed on a streamer was an 18” bow. The monsters we moved were life altering.
We also had a ridiculous time on the MO with Aaron Wert (who could be Ben Duininck’s long lost twin - seriously they HAVE TO BE from the same gene pool). Aaron grew up chasing musky and walleye in Edina, MN (and knows some of Leon’s peps from Edina) and brought some of his MN fish hunting skills to MT, and basically cracked the code on the MO in the section just below Holter dam. We spent two 12hr+ days on the water with Aaron and tied into an absurd number of big fish, landing a dozen fish over 20". Moss and I both lost fish over 25” (best guess). We landed several over 22”. It felt like stealhead fishing on the Muskegon... Would highly recommend Aaron for the Mo: http://gallatinvalleyoutfitters.com/ and Steve for the Madison: http://www.slideinn.com/
And I'm supposed to work this week?
