Yellowstone River Drift Boat Fly Fishing Primer

by

Walter Wiese, Head Guide

The following checklist is designed to prepare anglers for their first float trip on the Yellowstone.  Drift boat angling is new for many visitors to our area and the Yellowstone fishes differently from a drift boat than many other rivers do, which means many anglers struggle at first.  Your guide will certainly remind you of the following guidelines during the course of your trip, but an introduction beforehand may help you maximize angling success, your enjoyment of the day, and your safety.

Safety and Efficiency

Safety needs to be your first concern while floating the Yellowstone.  It's a fast, hard-flowing river with a great deal of whitewater, especially in the stretches Parks' Fly Shop often floats.  Thus it's important for you to know how to prevent injury to yourself and how to ensure you do not jeopardize the safety of the boat.  Many of these tips also double to make a more efficient floating experience, minimizing line tangles, helping the guide hold the boat in position, and so on.  Here are the guidelines:

1. Stay in the casting brace or centered in the seat at all times, save when you must move to land a fish, untangle your line, or if the guide asks you to do something.  This keeps the boat level horizontally, which in turn helps the guide row more easily.  Since many stretches of the Yellowstone require hard rowing to keep the boat where it needs to be, whether to fish effectively or to make it safely through a rapid, this is a vitally important guideline to keep the boat as a whole safe.  It's also safer for you.  If you're firmly locked in the brace, you can stand up through all but the worst rapids.  If you're not locked in, a simple hard pull on the oars --necessary to avoid a submerged rock noticed late, for example-- may be enough to throw you out of the boat.  Failure to follow this rule and the next one are the only reasons anyone has ever fallen out of the boat during a float trip with PFS.

2. Do not step out of the boat before your guide says to do so.  Even if the boat seems like it has stopped, it may move suddenly before the anchor has found firm footing, especially if river currents are unpredictable, as they usually are early in the season.  The Yellowstone also often has steep banks, meaning the river may be three feet deep only a foot or two from the shore.  Your guide will usually want to hop out first to steady the boat so you can disembark easily.

3.  Keep track of loose line, both inside and outside the boat.  Getting slack line wrapped around the oarlocks, the oar blades, the anchor line, and other parts of the boat can make it difficult for the guide to row and can damage your fly line.  A particular situation to be aware of is when casting distances change suddenly, as they often do on the Yellowstone.  If you go from casting 40 feet to 20 feet, it's easy to forget to reel up all the slack, and it has to go somewhere.

4.  Keep your casts vertical, and try not to cast with a great deal of slack.  Sidearm casting and casting with a great deal of slack line are the most common causes of sticking yourself or the other occupants of the boat with a fly.  Otherwise, the guide is down low enough and the front and rear casting positions far enough apart that accidents seldom happen.

5.  That said, it's still even more important to wear sunglasses and a hat in the boat than it is to wear them on foot, because there's a lot of fly line flying back and forth in a small area.

6.  If your guide says to do something: put on your life jacket, sit down, lean to one side of the boat or the other, etc., do it immediately.  Your guide is the ship's captain, and he may need you to do something quickly for your safety or to help the boat handle properly.

7.  Be prepared for bad weather.  I have had temperatures drop from the 70s to the 40s in less than an hour while floating with clients.  This would have been problematic if my clients had not brought raincoats and sweatshirts along.

8. If you happen to see a submerged rock or log, or another obstacle, and the guide doesn't seem to know about it, by all means let him know.  Odds are that the guide already knows about the obstacle, but it's impossible for us to remember every rock in the river.  This tip especially applies to the angler in the front of the boat, who has a higher viewing angle than the guide and can see directly in front of the boat, which the guide cannot do.

Fishing

1.  Unless your guide says otherwise, you will be casting downstream at a varying angle, then throwing a large upstream mend.  Since the boat is moving faster than the fly most of the time, the boat will catch up to the fly.  The angler in the front of the boat will want to pick up the fly and cast again before the boat comes even with the fly, while the angler in back can let his or her drift continue a bit further back.  The angler in front of the boat can cast anywhere from straight ahead of the boat to just before the oars while the angler in back has a smaller area to start with.  Thus it is vital that the angler in front pick up his/her cast soon enough to avoid interfering with the angler in the back of the boat.

2.  The Yellowstone is a fast river that carries a significant head of water well into August.  As such, for most of the season the best fishing is to be found within a few feet of the bank except in some riffles, corners, and other locations where your guide may pull over to fish from an anchored boat or on foot.  Early in the season, from the first of July until around the 20th, it is vitally important to get your fly or flies as close to the bank as possible.  A foot is good, six inches is better.  During the salmon fly hatch, the best casts go up under the overhanging willow branches.  To prepare for this necessity as well as the next tip, set up a series of small targets (trash can lids, dog bowls, cones, etc.) and practice casting to them from ranges of 20-35 feet, at a variety of angles, when the wind is blowing and when it is not.  Probably the single greatest limiting factor in the total number of strikes an angler gets is how close he or she casts to the bank. 

3.  Your guide will often instruct you to cast at a particular small target: a rock, a log, a current line, and the like.  Get used to picking up your fly and quickly casting again, often with a change of direction.

4.  There are, of course, exceptions to the above two rules, especially late in the season.  Here's a rule of thumb: cast just inside (closer to the bank) the first current line off the bank, be it two inches off the bank or five feet.  After your mend, your fly will run along the edge of this current line.  Fish holding in the slow water close to the bank will be used to looking for food at this point.

5.  You only get one cast per spot except in odd circumstances.  No matter how big a fish you miss, don't cast back to it unless the guide says to do so. 

6.  The distance of a drift --the distance your fly travels before you pick up to cast again-- may vary from a foot to twenty or thirty feet, depending on structure, current speed, and other factors.  As such, you should be prepared to cast once every twenty seconds down to once every second or two.  In general, slower sections of river and those with more homogenous bankside structure will allow longer drifts and therefore require fewer casts, while fast, broken water and water with complex currents will require shorter drifts and therefore more casts.

7.  In many places we float, the primary fish are cutthroat trout.  Since we fish dry flies most of the time, it is important to note that cutthroats usually rise EXTREMELY slowly.  For those of you used to fishing for stocked trout, you will need to slow down your hookset by at least 50%.  The single greatest reason anglers miss strikes is by setting the hook too quickly and pull the fly away from the trout.  A good rule of thumb: count "one-one thousand" before you strike after a trout eats your dry fly.  If fishing a dropper nymph, set the hook immediately when you see a flash or your dry fly goes under.

8.  If you see a patch of foam near current (such as behind a rock, in a small eddy, etc.), always put a cast directly into the center of this foam even if your fly will only rest there for half a second.  There's always a trout under such patches.  Better yet, if possible drop a cast into the current that leads into a foam patch, so your fly mimics the natural food that collects there.

9.  If there's a rock that breaks the current near the bank, try to drop your fly into the current line closer to the bank and flip your fly line over the rock.  It's harder to put a cast into these spots than to cast closer to the boat than the rock, but that means the fish on the inside (closer to the bank) is more likely to have avoided getting hooked recently, and it's often bigger.

10.  Do not stop fishing unless your guide says to do so.  What this means in practice is that you should not sit down when going through a rapid unless the guide says to do so.  Some of the best fishing can be had by making precise casts followed by short drifts into the slow spots in the middle of rapids, both because the trout are concentrated in these spots and because many anglers are afraid to fish these spots.

11.  If you hook a fish or need help with something (untangling a knot, etc.), let the guide know as soon as possible.  Sometimes we're busy facing downriver and don't notice problems, especially for the angler in the back of the boat.

12.  In general, the angler in front will catch more fish than the angler in back, or at least they'll have better chances than the angler in back.  While generally we'll have you switch places after lunch, our clients can arrange themselves however they wish.  Often a child or teenager, or any other beginner, will spend the entire day in front.

If you have any questions about the above guidelines, feel free to contact us.