Over to the Mighty Mo

Before we left Dewey, MT on the Big Hole we decided to take a drive over to Ennis, one of our favorite Montana spots, and where we will be for 3 weeks later in August.  It was a beautiful day, and the icing on the cake was stopping in at their fabulous meat market, Deemos.

Beautiful day!

I guess driving cattle down the roads is normal out here

We had to drive around town to see what was happening while we were there.

I'll bet they aren't like this in deer season:-)

Then we had to stop on the way back for coffee, tried to find a spot with a view, very hard to do in these parts:-)

Looking down on the Madison Valley above Ennis

The next morning we drove up to Cascade, MT, a tiny town on the Missouri River, went to the same campground as last year, Prewett Creek, a small but nice place to stay across the road from the river with stunning views in a small canyon.  We went to look over the river and even wet our lines a bit, stopped into a fly shop to inquire about a float trip.

Jan fishing the Mighty Mo

Now as I mentioned in the last post, we, read me more than Jan, was having a little trepidation about a float trip with the virus around.  We asked around and we observed that basically nothing unusual except for some extra cleaning was happening with the floats, and that was proven as we watched countless drift boats with guides going by looking exactly as they ever looked.  I went back and forth, and finally decided that 8+ hours with a guide 3 feet from each of us wasn't going to cut it right now.  So we decided to chew on it for a bit.

We drove up to Great Falls to get some groceries and a pizza for lunch which we ate overlooking the river in a park.  Then the next day we took a ride up north of Cascade to a cute little town called Augusta, and what a nice ride!

Incredible scenery

What a day!

You can see why they call it Big Sky country

And of course, our stop for coffee

We decided what we would do instead of a guided float was rent a drift boat for the day, and have our truck and trailer shuttled from our put-in spot to our take-out spot.  After all, how hard could it be, we've watched many guides do it effortlessly.  So we picked up the boat the evening before so we could get an early start.  We planned to float about 12 miles.  

Our boat

Thankfully I watched a YouTube video on the basics of rowing a drift boat.  We got in the river at 0630 am, and dug in the oars and off we went.  And found out almost immediately that rowing a boat in current you can't out row is much more difficult than you think and counterintuitive.  As I said thank you YouTube video.  So after awhile we got the gist of it.  We shared the rowing so the other one could fish.

Ooooh, this is harder than it looked

How pretty is this?

Here fishy, fishy, fishy

Now we were on the river until 330pm, and we also found out that the only time you aren't rowing is when you are anchored along the side having coffee, lunch, changing flies, etc.  Yeah, we felt it.  And we also found out the very sedate river that we drove along so many times actually had several areas of rapids that you couldn't see from the road.  Yes, we survived.  Let me explain just a little bit about this rowing deal, since you can't just veer away from trouble, a rock, an eddy, a rapid, etc, you have to intentionally put the bow right at the obstacle and then row hard at 45 degrees across the current away from it, sounds easy enough writing it, but I'll tell you it is very hard to intentionally turn the boat towards the problem first so as to avoid it.

It was beautiful though

I will mention another thing.  We fished hard for all that time.  We used all the suggested flies from the shop, we used everything we could think of, we dry fly fished, we nymphed, we tried a hopper and a dropper combo and how many fish did we catch?  NOT EVEN ONE!

Trying yet another fly

She had to work at it, but Jan is still smiling

I'm not saying we won't ever rent a drift boat again, but if our goal is solely fishing, one way or the other we will be with a guide with him rowing, managing our flies, and trying to find the fish:-)