Six Days on the Bighorn

We put in below Fort Smith on a Tuesday morning cold enough to see our breath, which in late June meant something had shifted in the weather a week earlier than anyone expected. The river was up half a foot from a rain system that had pushed through the Bighorns.

Interesting turned out to be the right word. The first two days were a study in frustration — good water, right flies by every measure we knew, and nothing willing to commit. We changed patterns more times than I want to admit and caught exactly two fish worth mentioning between four of us.

The turn came on day three, not because we found some secret fly but because we finally slowed down enough to actually read the water instead of casting at all of it. There is a soft seam that runs along the cutbanks on the Bighorn where big fish hold when the light is flat, and we had been floating right past it.

By the fourth day we had found a rhythm. Short casts, tight to the bank, letting the fly dead-drift for exactly as long as it took to cover eight feet of seam before recasting. My nephew, on his first real float trip, landed a brown the guide put close to twenty-four inches.

There were three broken tippets over the course of the week, all of them my fault, all of them fish I will think about longer than I probably should. I have decided this is simply part of the toll for fishing water this good.

Six days is enough time on a river to stop counting fish and start noticing the water itself — where the light hits the cutbank at seven a.m., which riffles hold fish only after the sun clears the canyon wall, the sound the Bighorn makes over gravel versus over bedrock. That is the part of a long float that stays with you longest.