Beaverhead Trout Report

Saturday marked my first guide trip of the season. We floated the Beaverhead from Pipe Organ to Barretts. The day started off dark and dreary and a light drizzle. Rather  perfect actually and as expected Andrew and Rob were soon hooked up. Browns mostly with a couple small rainbows tossed in for good measure. Most were in the 10-12 inch range but both landed trout in the 15-16 inch range. One Rob got probably would have gone 17 but that's just a guess. It seemed to me like an unusually large number small trout in the river. An observation the Frontier guys totally agreed. Since the bigger browns seem to be in exceptional shape this spring the consensus was the apparent over-abundance of small trout could very well be just temporary...stay tuned.

We started with nymphs and for the most part stuck with them most of the day. Although we tossed a variety streamers below Grasshopper. Didn't do much for the overall body count but did induce a fair number of chases. But other than a few tugs not much came of that idea. For what it's worth a brown cone-head bugger drew the most looks. A size 16 tan soft hackle with a pink/orange head was far and away the star nymph. (I forget the name, sorry). A thin bwo hatch brought a couple tiddlers to the surface, not near consistent enough to even consider switching. There were a few caddis around but again nowhere near enough to get the trout fired up.

Last week I fished the lake twice with mixed results. The first day the lake was nearly dead calm and way too bright for my taste. Thus the fishing was sort of slow. A few tugs, a couple quick long range releases and just one solid hook up. A sizeable brown which I somehow managed to lose right at the beach. The second day was just the opposite, slight breeze, noticable chop, not too bright resulted in takes about every 15 minutes or so and a couple really fat rainbows (see above) on the beach. Obviously in full spawn mode Clark Canyon rainbows at this season are really something to behold...fat, fiesty, colorful and damn happy lookin to my way of thinkin... Small jigs worked best, especially a glitzy dark green job.