The JJ is Special

An angler's confidence in a fly is an interesting thing. Call me crazy, but it almost seems as if those positive vibes are transferred down the line and to the fly, giving it an effectiveness that it doesn't posses at the hands of a pessimistic angler.

I've had some favorites over the years, flies that inspired great confidence on the water. Back in the day it was a brown bugger. Then it was the stimulator. This winter it was a partridge and pink soft hackle. I've got a lot of love for the Chernobyl family come summer. But at the present time, the JJ Special is a fly that I have a great deal of confidence in.

The fly represents nothing exactly, but many things loosely. I believe it's a very effective crayfish imitation. I'm sure it's taken as a stonefly nymph at times. It certainly has some baitfish qualities to it. It's an easy tie and the standard recipe turns out a tasty product, but when tied in various colors and sizes the fly can represent certain trout (and bass) delicacies even more effectively. A black, or black/yellow JJ is a solid variation, as is an olive JJ. In its various incarnations, the JJ has now overtaken half of my bugger barn.

The fly is absolutely deadly on the drift, on the swing or stripped. Most of my confidence in this fly comes from dead drifting it in tandem with a smaller nymph. But then many a good fish has fallen for the JJ at the tail end of a drift when it swings and rises in the current, its rubber legs and marabou undulating invitingly. And there have been many memorable days spent pounding river banks with a JJ, stripping it feverishly through the lies of big, streamer eating browns.

I've caught rainbows, cutts, browns and smallmouth on a JJ. It has hooked me up in some dire looking situations, where visibility was under a foot. In gin clear water the fly can be a bit gaudy, but still plenty effective. It may be at its best somewhere in between these conditions, when the water has a touch of green to it and visibility is in the 3- to 4-foot range. It's generally at home in big water, but I've had success with it on smaller streams, particularly if browns are part of the equation.

I'm gushing a bit, I know, but the JJ really has been good to me. Case in point: over the past two days I caught about a dozen fish with it on the Madison River below Beartrap Canyon, including both my largest brown and rainbow to date on this stretch of river.

For whatever reason this fly has instilled a little extra confidence to my fishing, and there's something to be said for that.

A Reacquaintance

I went back. Back to where it all began. A drift down memory lane.

Last week I hopped on a big old jet airliner, leaving behind a wintery Montana for a sun drenched Arizona. It was good to go home, to see family and friends, to just be in Flagstaff, and to wet a line at some familiar haunts.

As I eased my Teva clad feet into the water of Oak Creek, and later Wet Beaver Creek, I felt an overwhelming sense of deja vu. At the same time I felt distinctly out of place. I haven't been fishing small streams nearly enough since I moved to Montana, and it showed. For the past three years I've been focused on learning how to fish the big water of rivers such as the Yellowstone, Madison and Missouri, a task that was quite overwhelming initially. Now the tables had turned and I seemed to have lost my old knack for catching trout on small streams.

The intimate pocket water of these Arizona streams had my drifts feeling like awkward, discombobulated, thingamabobbered, obtrusive affairs. I was sloppily spooking fish left and right in the low, clear water. The combination of my 9' rod and even longer leader were rather ridiculous...it's tough to load a 5 weight with only a few inches of line extending beyond the rod tip!

I was humbled. I thought I'd learned so much in Montana over the past few years. I thought that I was going to bring those new found skills back to AZ with resounding success. That wasn't the case, I quickly found that I couldn't impose my new tricks upon these streams. Eventually I settled back into old rhythms, shortened my leader, employed a dry-dropper setup, reduced my false casting, and kept to the shadows as I worked upstream. It felt good to be back in tune with things.

I returned to Montana a couple of days ago, just in time for the opening day of fishing season (many small streams and larger rivers such as the upper Madison are closed until the third Saturday in May). Despite the fact that yesterday may very well have been the last day of fishable conditions on our big freestones until after runoff, I found myself on a couple of small streams in the Gallatin Canyon. I loved every minute of it.

I've been reacquainted with the magic of small stream fly fishing and I'm looking forward to maintaining that connection.

Back from the Smith

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Right? After a challenging Smith River trip, I'd like to believe that is the case. After a few days of indecisiveness leading up to the launch date, due to river conditions and a member of our party canceling, we decided to go ahead and float the Smith River anyway. I really had my heart set on spending my 30th birthday on the Smith and with a forecast calling for cool temperatures, we were hopeful that the river would be dropping and clearing throughout our trip.

On the morning of Tuesday, the 27th, we launched our canoe at Camp Baker with beautiful weather and pretty good river conditions (2' of visibility). Most folks do the Smith over 4 nights and 5 days, we opted to extend the trip by a night and a day to ensure that we'd have ample time to fish over the course of this 59 mile float.

The first day and a half of the trip went off without a hitch and we stopped frequently to wade fish the more productive looking water. The first flies out of my box were a JJ Special and a San Juan...I never had to deviate from that tandem setup. The fish were all over both flies on the drift, and a few took the JJ on the swing. Lots of heavy browns up to 17" and quite a few solid rainbows came to hand those first couple of days on the water. Best of all, the 70-80% chance of rain on Tuesday night and Wednesday didn't materialize...things were going great!

But then things took a turn for the worse late on Wednesday. Long story short, we dumped the canoe in a pushy cliffside sweeper that we approached much too casually. That debacle cost us dearly, we lost a paddle, a rod, an axe and 3/4s of our beer! Fortunately we were less than a mile from our boat camp and the clouds never opened up that night, giving us a chance to quickly build a warming fire and dry ourselves out. Hypothermia avoided, we settled into our respective tents for the night, looking forward to more fishing and paddling in the morning.

It wasn't to be, at dawn on Thursday morning I awoke to the sound of quiet, but persistent spattering on my tent walls...a light drizzle I assumed. As I peered out of the vestibule I was surprised to find a wintry scene with snow falling hard and accumulating quickly; this hadn't been in the forecast! By the time I'd finished my first cup of coffee the storm had intensified greatly, with heavy snow blowing in sideways on a fierce, sustained wind. This wasn't a day to be on the river in a canoe. We got a hot fire going and fed it steadily as the snow piled up in the canyon. We hunkered down and waited out the storm, spending three nights and two full days at the Canyon Depth boat camp as more than 2' of snow fell over a 36 hour period.

We had company in camp on Thursday evening when a lone, cold and weary rafter pulled ashore after battling the storm all day. He was happy to warm himself around our fire and share the dry firewood and beer he had on his boat. The rest of his party was still a half mile upriver and never made it into camp that night, they pulled over and set up a makeshift camp after several failed attempts to pull through a big eddy with a nasty crosswind - they finally made it into camp Friday morning during a lull in the wind. We all waited out the storm together that day, sharing stories and pulls of whiskey around the fire. The guys we shared camp with have floated the Smith for some 30 years, often finding themselves on the river in April - they said that this was by far the worst storm they'd experienced on the Smith.

The storm broke late on Friday and we covered the final 40 miles or so of river in short order, putting in a 30 mile day on Saturday and a 10 miler on Sunday. We were pushing to get off the river and didn't fish much over the final two days and when we did it was unproductive. The trip was challenging and offered up the worst weather conditions I've ever experienced on an extended, self-supported backcountry trip of any nature. But we survived it, learned a few things along the way and gained some valuable experience. I like to think I'm stronger for it.