Across the Wide Missouri

The epilogue to our wilderness adventure in the Bob was a trip to Craig, MT to fish the Missouri River below Holter Dam. Craig is an eyeblink of a town on I-15 and Montana Highway 434. Despite its small physical size its reputation as a trout town is enormous as the parking lots packed with pickups and drift boat trailers can attest. We arrive mid-afternoon on a Sunday and headed straight to Isaacs restaurant for a woolly burger and cold beer. Next we checked in with my nephew, Mike Kuhnert, at Headhunters Flyshop to discuss plans for our float trip the next day. Mike has been a licensed guide for only a few years but he has been fishing the Missouri since his college days at Montana State University in Bozeman.

The next day, fortified with calories, cholesterol, and coffee from an ungodly breakfast at the Trout Shop Café, we put in two drift boats at Holter Dam with Mike and fellow guide Mark Raisler.

The Missouri is billed as the world’s largest spring creek and as on the Spring Creek in PA the most productive patterns are nymphs. We fished a double nymph rig with an indicator for most of the day. JohnW, my partner in the boat with Mike, had great luck with this rig mainly because of his lightening reaction time to indicator movement. John also caught a greater ratio of browns to rainbows, just the opposite of their ratio in the river. My 50-year-plus reaction times were more like symptoms of Parkinson’s. I did catch some nice Mo Bows but I had greater ratio of whitefish to rainbows. Go ahead and laugh—those whities can be great fighters! Mike Kuhnert netting yet another trophy trout for JohnW

Wade and Bowhunter murdered those stupid trout with their guide Mark Raisler.

MO BOW

Mike and Mark put in a long (8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.) hard day rowing us up and down the river, netting fish, changing flies, fixing tangles, and making great conversation. Those two worked their asses off and earned every penny of their fee. We tipped generously and bought several rounds for them and their friends that night in Isaacs.

The next day Mike and I went out as nephew and uncle and fished from the Wolf Creek bridge to Craig. My reaction times were better and I landed several nice rainbows and this beautiful 20-inch brown trout.

Near the end of the half-day float we picked up Bowhunter who was fishing along the bank and not having much luck. That changed soon after he climbed in the boat and landed rainbows and browns right and left. While we were floating, JohnW was busy fighting and landing a monster rainbow near the Channel islands.

There were planes to catch early the next morning so Bowhunter, JohnW, and I parted ways with Wade later that afternoon and drove back to Kalispell via Highway 200 along the Blackfoot river and Highway 89 up through the Swan River valley. A sense of contentment and wistfulness came over us on the drive back as we contemplated the last 10 days. It had been a great trip. Knowing that the Chief would expect nothing less than our best behavior, we had conducted ourselves in the best RBF prostaffer fashion and enjoyed each other’s company. There were no blowups and no fracases; we caught a hell of a lot of fish and had a shit load of fun. Let’s do it again real soon.