Trip Report (!) Rock Creek

Once a year I get to take a friend of mine out for a day of fishing at the
river of my choice. As with much of the rest of the country we are plagued
by hot weather. The Bitterroot was 76 deg Wednesday, the Lower Clarks Fork
and the Blackfoot are on mandatory hoot owl (closed to fishing noon-
midnight) They are asking for hoot owl hours on the Rock Creek. The guides
are beating paths to the might Mo. so its a regular traffic jam their I'm
told. So I opted fro upper Rock Creek.

A couple years back when we had the Western Clave at Rock Creek we all
figured out that you need to get to the upper reaches of the creek to find
cool water and healthy fish. So I picked up Sean at 5:30 am and headed for
the upper reaches of the creek off of the Skalkaho road. The first good
sign was when we stopped in Pburg for a bag of ice and the thermometer in
the car read 39 deg at 6:30- all right.

Probably in the water about 7:30- water temp read off at 48 deg. just
fooling around under the bridge while Sean got his gear together caught a
feisty little 12" cutthroat on an EHC. Caddis were already starting to come
off even thought the sun hadn't yet hit the water. We started to work our
way downstream- surrounded by private land so the only access point was the
bridge for the next 8 miles.

We both fished dry flies in the morning. I don't really keep count of fish,
but I think I had my first 50 fish day- to hand, if not it was damn close.
At one point I had 7 casts, 7 strikes in a row- missed them all. I finally
figured out that while barbless hooks are fine, pointless hooks are, well,
pointless. After mutilating about 4 or 5 caddis patterns, the fishing
seemed to let up slightly- maybe around 11 am or so, so I switched over to a
hopper pattern and stayed with that for the rest of the day. My friend Sean
doesn't do much dry fly fishing but he too had an awesome morning using my
son in laws 3 wt Scott. Sean lives in Alaska and does a lot of ff'ing
there- but he's not accustomed to a 3 wt. He did very well. We finally
decided we were far enough down stream from the car, tired, thirsty, and hot
so we made our way back to the car. We both figured we had fished down 1 or
2 miles and it must be about 1 or 2 pm (neither of us had a watch). Turned
out we hadn't covered 1/2 mile of water and it was after 4 pm. Water temp
at that point was about 64 deg.

We went downstream about 8 or 9 miles and fished for a couple of hours. I
caught my best fish of the day, probably an 18 in. cutt with beautiful
coloring. Sean caught all cutts, I caught mostly cutts, but did land 2
browns, one maybe 16" or so. Most of the fish were small- under 12", but
there were a handful of nicer fish. I really enjoyed the day, it's not
often you get to fish the entire day on Rock Creek with dries, and do well
all day.

One item of note on gear. I picked up a set of Maui Jim rose colored wrap
arounds- they are great. I still can't pick fish out well just lookig into
the stream, but I could see very well into the water and watched many many
take's transpire as the fish came up off of the bottom. the contrast
enhancemend and the wrap around features are excellent.

We drove out the length of the creek to see the scenery, and ended the day
with a nice burger and a beer at Ekstroms

That might be about it for fishing around here, the forests are dryer than a
popcorn fart. Stage 1 fire status all over, and i'm betting we get to stage
3 before very long (forests closed). Sure hope we get some relief from the
temps and a bit of moisture or its gonna be bad fire season here in the next
couple weeks.

jh