Ray calls me on Sunday and says he, Larry and I are hitting the Missouri on Tuesday to put some serious hurt on the Missouri River Carpage. I say, "Sure"!
We put in at the Totson Bridge for the roughly 12 mile float down to the take out at York Island.
We begin the float and immediately see Carpage sign......backs sticking out of the 6 inch deep shoreline off color water and Carp scattering as the boat shadow gets within 50 feet of them. We do a "bank and bail" as it is sight fishing to the extreme. We are armed with 6 to 7 wt rods loaded with 9 feet of 0X mono leader, 2 feet of 1X flouro tippet and the ever endearing and Carpage killer.....Yukbug. We begin our stalking.
We stalk, float, stalk and float for about 2 hours with no hook ups. The fish are extremely spooky. We decide to change tactics and look for the deep pools created by Beaver Lodges and big slow eddys in rip-rap areas where we can cast from the boat on a drift-by or reach them by stealth wading.
I soon hear a shout from Ray, who is stripping his line madly, as he is hooked up to....something.....and something large. The first thing I yell is,
"HAND BRAKE IT!" just to see if he is concentrating. Ray is focused like a yig laser. Ray slowly guides the fish out of the huge eddy into shallow water. I'm the net bitch on this one and attended to my duties. Here is Ray with his 9 lb'er.
The next shout is from Larry who is hooked up with a nice 18-19" Rainbow. We normally don't see that large of Rainbow in this section. Good to know for next time as if there is one...there are others.
Larry and I soon hear Ray chattering from a short distance. He is cussing up a storm so we turn and look. Ray has broken the tip off his 7 wt Sage and also broken section 2 of his 3 piece rod. WTF! I yell at Ray to keep his left hand on the line, again, just to see if he is concentrating. Larry and I are near the boat...I tell Larry he is the net bitch on this one and we HAVE to get this on celluloid......I grab the camera.
As Ray battles the Carpage, I verbally bet him he can't land a fish with a Sage that turned to slag. Ray continues to battle as I snap pics and Larry is the net bitch.
Larry flawlessly nets the fish as Ray breathes a sigh of relief.
Ray wants to make sure that I (especially me, after giving him shit) and others know he landed the fish and that he, again, was victorious. WTG! Ray.
Another nice Carpage.
As the thermometer soars to around 95 and the big W is almost nonexistent (but, not for long), we notice the fish are lazily rising and slurping in the large eddys. Bitchin! We think it's time...dry fly action. We frantically pull behind a large Beaver Lodge that protects an upstream eddy. Ray is first out of the boat with a size 16 Parachute Adams tied on to his spare 6 wt and skulks silently upstream. As Larry and I watch, Ray's third cast hits the mark. I yell, "get 'er Ray" as he soon lands close to another 9 pound porker.
I'm next in the feeding frenzy and within 5 casts, also with the Parachute, I drag a 5 pounder down and out.
Larry, of course, got hosed as the fish bailed. We tried a few wet fly's but the fish split. Oh Well, onward and downstream...we got a lot of water left.
About 3:30pm or so, I noticed dark, ominous clouds heading' North...right towards us. Hmmmm. 15 minutes later the wind is causing whitecaps to travel upstream...groovy. It looks like this when your in the middle of it.
The wind stops the Clackacraft cold and starts pushing it upstream. Apparently, 4600 cfs downstream just doesnt cut it. We really, really didn't want to go that direction since the truck and trailer are still 7 miles downstream. Ray is rowing at this point and spins the stern into the wind and starts to power row down. This lasts about 60 seconds since it was clear that wouldn't work either. We bank the boat and wait it out for about an hour. As we wait, I see this Osprey....he or she wasn't going anywhere either.
The wind died down enough to travel downstream. Larry had to power row and the fishing sucked for a little while til the wind quit. The drifts were short and erratic. We stopped at some downstream eddy's to try and get Larry a large Carpage. 10 minutes later...fish on.....a.......Rainbow. But, a very nice Rainbow at around 20" or so.
We had a great day of fishing. We also saw 2 Bald Eagles, 1 Golden Eagle, Osprey, Hawks, a Porcupine, a Beaver, White Tails and Mule Deer.
Another average day on the Missouri.
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