Our first float trip!

Last year Jan and I started fly fishing, her for the first time and me after 30 years.  We've really gotten into it and enjoy it very much.  I have posted several of our adventures to date.  This summer we wanted to really hit the fishing hard, and planned our route to take advantage of several of the famous western trout waters.  So one of the biggies on our list was the North Platte River, or Grey Reef as they call it.  This is big water and almost requires a float trip.  It is deep and fast so wading is difficult.  Now we had never done a float trip before.  They use a drift boat, a boat with upturned bow and stern, a flat bottom, a place for the guide to sit and row the boat, and 2 separate fishing stations forward and aft where the fisherman can either sit on a rotating chair or stand in a brace of sorts to keep your balance.

An example of a drift boat

  

We had to wait a couple days to get a trip booked so we went and did some exploring.  We were in a little, emphasis on the word little, town of Alcova, WY about 30 miles southwest of Casper, WY.  We stayed at a nice little campground behind the fly shop where we booked our trip, it only has 4 full hook up sites and 12 all together.  Pretty spartan, but it had all we needed and a view to boot.

The view from our campsite

We drove up to Casper and did a big loop back to Alcova, and found an interesting place, Fremont Canyon.  A canyon between Alcova Lake and Pathfinder Reservoir, it is carved out of solid rock with the river flowing through it.

Pretty rugged

Beautiful!

We got a good view of the Gray Reef, some colorful scenery along the way, and a nice view of Casper.  I will say though, there isn't a lot of dramatic scenery, in fact there is a whole lot of nothing up in this area of the state.

The "Gray Reef" or North Platte River

A little color along the way

That's Casper in the distance, the 2nd largest city in Wyoming

But the whole reason we came was the float trip.  We showed up at 7:30am to meet our guide, Matt, and have him brief us on what to expect, what we needed to do, and how to set the hook, and how to fight the fish.  We were a bit amused as we each had to follow his direction and he took one end of the line and pretended to be a fish that we were fighting in the parking lot.  I thought man o man, you just be careful and bring in the fish, just like we have a ton of times.  But he was real nice about it and we did listen and tried to remember his instruction.  They provide all the terminal tackle which means all we had to do was bring our fly rods and reel, and then Matt attached a leader, an indicator, a small weight and two nymphs (hooks) to our line.  This was another new thing for Jan and I.  We have only fished with dry flies, small tied flies that imitate the insects coming off the water as they hatch that trout love to eat.  You have to understand the life cycle of these aquatic insects, as flies they mate, lay eggs in the water and die.  Those eggs hatch and become nymphs, those creepy, crawly things you find in a stream or a river under or on a rock in the water, when the time comes they release from the bottom and rise to the surface where they transition to become a flying insect.  So when you dry fly fish you are trying to imitate the fly as it leaves the water to fly, but when you fish nymphs, you weigh down the two flies on your line to imitate the nymphs as they release from the bottom.  And in the warm times such as these the larger trout stay down in the water where it is cooler and eat the nymphs.  I'm sure that is probably a lot more than any of you wanted to know about trout fishing:-)  

So off we went in Matt's truck with the boat and trailer.  Understand he does everything for you, actually quite nice.  He handles the boat, offers guidance and a bit of instruction, ties all the flies, etc on the line, nets the fish, decides where in the river to go, if you lose a fly, he provides and ties on a new one, decides when to change up the flies, all of it, you are quite pampered, and to be honest, it is pretty expensive to do this so it's a nice touch.

We were on a half day morning trip, and spent about 4 hours plus on the river, covering about 8 miles.  

Where we put in the river

All set to go

We were only in the river getting situated for about 10 minutes when I caught my first trout.  And wow, his instruction came in handy, it took over 5 minutes to land a nice 17 inch fat rainbow trout!  It fought more than any trout I've ever caught before.  An absolute blast!

Fish on!

My first fish

I'll tell you, we had never caught anything like this.  We became believers and loved it!
Well, unfortunately, we went quite awhile until Jan caught her first one.  It is intense to constantly watch the indicator in the water, because Murphy's Law, the instant you look away is when a fish hits your fly.  

Jan's very nice fish!

I caught 2 more small fish, and although we each had several hits, we were getting a little discouraged, and we think so was Matt.  He changed up our flies a couple times and although we had some hits, we couldn't set the hook.  Almost near the end of our trip, Jan got into a really nice fish, she was fighting it and as it ran it was getting near my line, so I decided to pull mine out of the water to give her more room, just as I went to pull it out, bam, I got a nice fish on!  So here we are, both of us fighting fish, each one running in a different direction, Matt trying to keep the boat in the optimum position for both of us, really, really neat.  So after almost 10 minutes we both got our fish landed, a two for one!  Awesome.

A twofer!

Well we had a ball and think we are converts to this float fishing thing.  We hope to do one more this summer and are still trying to figure the best place to do it.  If you like fly fishing, this is a very cool thing to do.