Lower Madison Aug. 30th

The past few days the lower madison has been fishing better than I've seen all summer.  Big browns moving in and sporting new coats of orange and ready to attack the tasty sculpin prey.  The bite is on with short 6ft. nymph rigs working great in cloudy rainy weather with Mega prince, Bow river buggers, sculpzillas, micro may, lightning bug, and zebra midges being my favorites.  When the sun comes out we had some decent action on M's hoppers in tan, royal wolff, Bloom's parachute flying ant, and neversink trudes in peacock.  Had best luck on shallow riffles and grass mat buckets for rising fish, kinda had to find the feeding pods mostly for heads coming up.  Been seeing tons of crayfish along the banks with a brownish red color to them, haven't had much luck with the patterns except for H's rock and roller stone in orange which i am led to believe the fish see them as crayfish, either way they work.  If you are really after big browns throw sculpin patterns and make them dance a lot, stack mends, jerk strips, on the swing are all good methods.  

On another note a boulder fell on a gas line at Ennis lake Dam so they are letting out a lot of water, like 9ft. from Ennis lake to get it fixed.  As of Tuesday morning the water is still clear by Black's Ford and a little murky by Warm Springs (two feet of visibility) although the flow did spike 1500 cfs which is double the water. Not sure how this will affect fishing but don't think the water will scare the big fish that much.  Also been getting great reports from the Upper Madison and have caught some amazing baetis and psuedos hatches on the Yellowstone with heads coming up in a boiling way that i haven't seen since mother's day caddis hatch. Get out there and fish.

>)))))'>

Peter

the upper Madison