Carol Northcut | Wednesday, 26 April 2023
The last two weekends we’ve fished. We tried the South Fork of the Flathead below Hungry Horse Dam. Starting just above the town of Hungry Horse and working out way up a mile or so, Steve caught a couple of mountain whitefish in a deep hole. Neither of us even saw a trout. While climbing back up to the road on a somewhat treacherous hill filled with wader-puncturing wild rose and leaf-covered pockets of ice, we commiserated that the beautiful water should have more fish. Figuring it might be better further upstream, we drove up the road closer to The Devil’s Elbow, but it was even more disappointing. We determined the fish hadn’t migrated that far upstream yet. It is illegal to fish above the Elbow, probably because the canyon gets very steep as it nears the 582-foot dam.
This last weekend we tried fishing The Wild Mile, which starts about a mile above the town of Big Fork at a small, ten-foot-high electric-generating dam. The Wild Mile is listed as Class V, but much of it is beautiful pocket water when the flows are low, which they currently are. We fished up to the dam, during which time I saw one Golden Stone, but not a single fish, not even a fingerling or baitfish. Once again, we figured the fish hadn’t started migrating out of Flathead Lake. We have much to learn about the cycles of the fisheries in the area, the Lake influencing so much of it. Since the smaller lakes finally are starting to ice off, we’ll have a go at Largemouth and Pike, neither of which we’ve ever caught.
Two weeks ago, I shared my newly-discovered way of checking the angle of my back cast. Since then, I’ve found it has another use, which is to check the degree of angular rotation during the “flick” at the end of the cast. Over-rotation causes the line to fall below the piece of rope laid out on the ground, while under-rotation causes it to fall above. It’s much the same as Joan Wulff’s method of using a rope or stick to see if one is applying too much or too little force in a forward-facing side-arm cast.
Speaking of which, I asked Mac Brown why he dislikes the “power-snap.” He says it’s because it usually causes the top leg to deviate from SLP, thereby causing a tail. We can all agree that, used improperly, it does indeed. “Power-snap” seems to be one of those enduring misfortunate terms that may never go away.
Last week brought a couple of days of snow, but the next week or so should be much sunnier and warmer. It’s great because there are some mountain bike trails to explore in the area of the big cliffs just up the road. Additionally, we need to clear more downed trees, bucking them up, and stacking them for drying. Always so much to be done, but we enjoy it for the most part. Only trees under 12” are in our ability to work with. We’ll have the experts out again this summer to take down a couple of bigger ones.