Portneuf River Report 8/29/2009

Water Carity: fair

Water Temp: unknown, but warm still

Weather: Mostly cloudy 65 degrees.

Time: 9:00-11:00

Bugs: Caddis, small mayflies (not many), grasshoppers.

Not many fish moving this morning on the River but it is beginning to show signs of life. I hooked into one really nice fish and saw a handful of others working. The water quality is getting much better. The banks of the river were swarming with hoppers by 11:00 but fish are still not keying on them. We need some colder nights in order to really start the fish on the hunt. My guess is that due to the nice weather and warm nights that the fish are active at night. I would be interested to fish the Portneuf at night and find out if the big boys more active in the warm months. I expect the quality of the fishing on the river to change dramatically in the next few weeks.

Blackfoot River Report

Water off color

Air temp: 60

Bug activity: some PMD's, very minimal.

Usually the Blackfoot River is low and clear this time of year, but this has been anything but a normal year. Today the Blackfoot was still off color and running a little high. The narrows is really the place to be as the water that is usually too low to fish is actually quite nice right now. There were good numbers of active fish closer to the National Forest boundary on the west end of the river. I found some really nice fish in this section, they were feeding just subsurface on what looked like emerging PMD's. I really would expect for the river to clear a little more in the next few weeks and for the fish to get really active as the nights get colder and the hoppers get bigger.

Portneuf River Report

I fished the upper Portneuf this morning and let's just say it was really crappy. Water clarity is poor and the flows are still high. I have always held that the Portneuf is a morning fishery so stumbled out of bed this morning in great anticipation. At first glance the river looked good so I walked over the hill to one of my favorite stretches. The one angry bull that bellowed at me from the other side of the fence was the most excitement I had all morning. Not a fish in site, not a rise, not a wake nothing. There were good numbers of caddis hatching so that may prove promising for the future. On another note the stretch of the river that I was fishing usually has a nice gravelly bottom, this for the most part there is mud up to your knees, the river didn't blow out this year like it usually does in the spring so I think all the sediments just piled up. I really do think that the river will start fishing well when the farmers turn off their water, but it may be until the middle of August til it is ready. I'll keep posting.

Fish Pics

I got to take a trip with Nate to some creeks in the Columbia Gorge fishing some native redsides, later we went exploring a little creek on Mt. Hood. We found some great coastal cutts. Not huge but really nice fish for a creek this size; with small rods and fast water it really made for some exciting action.

A really nice coastal cutt with all of the heavy spotting.

Most of the water on the creek was very fast

Here are some pictures from a creek near the Continental Divide that we found. We don't really know the name of it but it was somewhere near Monida. Also are a few random Portneuf pictures that I liked and some from Birch Creek, on the highway between Terreton, Idaho and Salmon, Idaho.

Portneuf at Dusk

Todd with a nice Birch Creek brookie

An Average No Tell 'um Creek Brookie

That's right we worm fished the heck out of those brookies, mostly because we found a few really nice cutts in the same stream and wanted the brookies gone. . .yep we ate 'em.

I've been everywhere...man

I feel like that old Johnny Cash song, I really have been all over the great northwest in the last three weeks and have had a chance to fish nearly everywhere that I went. The first leg of my trip was to Northern Idaho where I fished for native cutthroats on some miniscule streams and some stocked rainbows and brookies on some bigger water. Then it was off to Portland Oregon. I fished with Nate, and we had a great time exploring some less traveled creeks in the Columbia Gorge. We found some really beautiful native redband trout in the gorge streams travlelling east toward Hood River. We then worked our way around Mt. Hood where on the eastern side we fished Cold Springs Creek and found a slough of native coastal cutthroat (at least that's what I think they are after looking at Cutthroat Stalkers cutthroat ID page). Later we fished a very small tailwater to a crappy looking reservoir and caught some brookies. The highlight of the trip for sure was the small, very fast water of Cold Springs Creek catching those little and sometimes not so little cutts. Now I am back in Southeast Idaho and have found myself doing some reclamation, I mean brook trout extermination, work on a little stream north of Dubois, Idaho almost to the continental divide and Wyoming border. We found some really nice cutthroat in the small stream and also found that if we fished worms in the creek we could catch lots of really big (10-14 in) brook trout. So the three amigos harvested about 60 brookies from the stream in two days and had a great time doing it. We also fished a little reservior filled with cutthroat called Paul's Reservoir near the Idaho/Montana border. Finally yesterday, I got to fish one of my all time favorite "fun water" at Birch Creek. Really, it turned out to be much more than we expected when we found a great stonefly hatch on the creek and got to fish huge flies to voracious fish. Tobee and I fished a stretch of the creek .3 miles long and landed over 100 fish in three hours. There is a reason Birch Creek is popular, I'm just glad to be able to fish some places that not many people fish. I have some great pictures but don't have them downloaded yet so those will come in the future.

June 10, 2009

Fished a few places on Toponce Creek this afternoon and really had a pretty good time. Fish larger than expected have moved out of the mainstem of the creek to the softer water of the South Fork. I fished three areas of the S.F., the extreme upper only producing a few small cutts, the middle was the best and actually had a great mayfly hatch, and the extreme lower which had picked up more water and the flows were just a little too high. It was about 50 degrees and cloudy today which really aided all the bug action. In the stretches of faster water I ran some weighted nymphs with some good success and in the slower water with rising fish I fished dries. I found one hole where there were probably 10-20 fish sipping adult mayflies and I automatically thought it would be like shooting fish in barrell. An hour later I had finally found the right pattern and landed about 10 of those fish, but I had to clear out my box to get it done. Talked to a friend of mine that has fished a few more things and according to him the Bear River is terrible right now, probably due to the "recreational flows" for kayakers and rafters. The Portneuf is high right now but fish can still be taken if you don't mind getting out the lead and dredging for them. 8 mile Creek near Soda Springs is high but fishable. Pebble Creek is the same. In addition, I drove through Yellowstone Park the other day and the park waters are realy fishable right now. Here are some pictures of our Yellowstone trip just to spice up the blog a little.

Spring fishing report

I have had the opportunity in the last week to travel the area and check on the condition of some of the water. In general most Caribou County streams are still too high to fish with a few exceptions. The Portneuf River flows are at good levels and the water clarity is surprisingly good. The river bottom is exceptionally muddy this year, probably due to the low spring runoff that usually blows out the river. I went to only one spot on the Portneuf that usually holds good numbers of fish and did not even see a fish, so I need to do more exploring. The very top of the South Fork of Toponce Creek fished well in the beaver dams. I caught two very small cutthroat yesterday out of 24 mile creek, but watch out for the mosquitos. Ledge creek has some great brook trout fishing. I checked out a friends recommendation in Franklin County this week also and found the water looking in pretty good shape. I believe they call this water the West Fork of the Bear River. I will be out of town for the next week but it looks like flows are already on the downhill slide and that things should be pretty normal by the second or third week of June this year.