The Beevahead 4/7

After a couple days of recuperating from our Missouri adventure, Cody, our new fishing buddy Trevor, and I decided to make a day run to the Beaverhead river near Dillon, MT. The beaverhead is known for its great brown trout population and I was very excited to fish some new water. Trevor owns his own drift boat (which is awesome), and I'm surprised that we haven't fished with him prior to this month considering that we've seen him over at the Mo several times and he is also a freshman at the U.

We stopped for some food in Butte (MacDonald's of course), and returned to the car to find we had a flat tire. Just our luck. It reminded me of the False Casts and Flat Tires crew. We quickly hit a Les Schwab and they repaired it for a small price. We were on our way in a little under an hour. We were in no rush.....It was 7 degrees in Butte.

Dirty Boat

Got to the river and in the water around 11. The river was smaller than expected but I liked the small riffles and slots where we knew fish would be. Cody immediately hooked up with a few fish in a nice run.

Nymphing was hot to start but as the day wore on, some cloud cover came in and it was time to switch to streamers. I had been fishing streamers all day and had only landed one brown. When we began fishing some rip-rap on the lower sections of the float, we started getting grabs like crazy. Only one problem; the fish would not fully commit to the flies we were throwing. We tried different colors, we tried different sizes.....the fish would simply not grab our flies.

Trevor with a nice Beaverhead Bow

There's no need to make a long story short because the story was that not one of us managed to land a fish on a streamer for the entire rest of the float. It was quite frustrating. We did find some rising fish during a heavy BWO hatch. Trevor presented perfectly and landed a nice brown.

Overall, I really liked the Beaverhead. The water was just the type of water that I like to fish and its small enough so that you can find fish easily in the defined slots and runs. I really wish the fish would have cooperated with streamer fishing because I probably missed about 50 grabs on the day. I'm sure as the water warms up the streamer fishing will continue to improve which leads me to believe that we will be back to the beaverhead very soon.

Melcher nymphing the prestigious Beaverhead

On the way home we saw a huge heard of elk between Dillon and Butte. It was pretty cool to see, for I have not seen elk yet since I've been to college.

Thanks to Trevor for rowing most of the day. We experienced dead mans rapids (as Cody calls it), and Trevor had no trouble in maneuvering us through the narrow fast stretch of river. He is pretty experienced with the drift boat deal. We are glad to have another fishing buddy join our amazing group of friends.