Jeff’s Dad is visiting and they are fly fishing with Jack for a few days. They went to the West Fork of the Bitterroot today. They left around 8:00 am, and it is a good thing. It got pretty darn hot today. Last I saw, it was 86 degrees.
This was the last day of Billy’s trip. He just sent me photos. They caught some hogs!! I mean big trout.
I just updated the slideshow below with photos from Jack’s camera.
Wet and rainy, yes it was, but Jeff and Jack still wanted to fish. They had a great day and here are some of the fish Jeff caught.
I will upload one and do a slideshow of a few more photos. Enjoy!
The weather is getting wetter and warmer and the river is on the rise.
Last week I got a call from an old guide friend, Jeff Levert.
He wanted to fish with me. It is always good to get on the water with incredible casters, professional oarsmen and genuinely good people. For a decade, mid-80s to 90s, Jeff and I were part of a team of about 6 other guides at the Complete Fly fisher on the Big Hole River. We all shared the resource, the clients, the expertise, and the fun. This was a really good time in our lives.
Jeff has since gotten out of guiding and works in the oil fields of Wyoming. He and his wife, Lisa, and their two beautiful young daughters live in Butte.
As you can see by these photos in the slideshow below, his passion for angling has not diminished.
Jeff came to fish today with his close friend, Patrick Botzet, now from Missoula, but raised on the Front Range near Cutbank, MT. Patrick and Jeff were extraordinary river companions and I learned a lot about the energy development in Wyoming. See Patrick’s website at Teton Exploration.
Dusty Bernard organizes a spring fishing trip to the Bitterroot. They stay at the Bitterroot River Lodge and fish with Wapiti Waters.
This year was the coldest weather they had fished in and Jack said it was the coldest water temperatures he had ever guided on. There was ice everywhere but the trout, including the Bitterroot native cutthroat you see Dusty holding, still came up to their dry flies. For this fish, Dusty used one of Banjo Jack’s Skwalla Dry Flies.
For more photos see the slideshow below. Hopefully, Dusty and others will send us some of the photos from their cameras. When they do, I will update the slideshow. Check back in a few days.
Choose View Album to see the photos in a new, larger window, then choose the slideshow option to view in full screen mode.
