9-16-23 Night float
My friend Dave and I decided to load up the drift boat and head north for a night float. It was going to be a much cooler night and almost no moon, which worked out great. Based on the flows, I decided to run a floating fly line with about a 7’ leader, which is really just a 7’ piece of 0X. Running a sinking line at night is tough, a lot of obstacles you can’t see, especially when the flows are on the lower side. The sinking lines tend to wrap around every shallow rock, especially if I try to do a slower retrieve. I also feel like I get a lot more takes in the upper foot of water when I fish at night. I have fished sinking lines at night, but I just seem to do better on a floating line in the dark. Perhaps keeping the fly above the fish creates a silhouette that it likes to attack. On this trip I also brought a euro rod to try jigging a fly that I tied the night before with a big 360 degree deer hair head and collar, but with a large tungsten bead. My experience tells me that it won’t work cause the flies will be too low, but I like experimenting with different ideas, obviously the idea here was to get the fly down low, and create a lot of vibrations and pulses by jigging the fly.
At the boat launch, there is a really long stretch of great water that always holds fish. This is where I planned on testing out the jigging rig. I gave it a solid 45 minutes of fishing up and down the run without a bump. That’s really not a lot of time, but the euro rod never came out of the holder the rest of the night.
The upper section below the boat launch is phenomenal, we almost always get a few fish out of the first run. I manned the oars and let Dave fish this section. I’m not sure what tippet size he had rigged, but he broke off two fish in the first stretch and then changed out his leader. We anchored up in some promising water and I started fishing a wooly sculpin, this is probably one of my favorite flies to fish at night. I always start fishing just like I do during the day, which an upstream cast and retrieving the fly back towards me. At night however, I’ll change things up a lot more. If that doesn’t seem to be working, I’ll angle my cast strait ahead, and then retrieve towards me and incorporate a bit of a swing. It’s more of an active swing because I still continue to strip the fly towards me, even as it swings across. If that doesn’t work, then I try to just give it a nice, lazy swing and keep the fly hanging in the water at the end of the swing. Once I’ve tried all of those techniques, i’ll take a few steps downstream and do it again.
After a few cycles with the wooly sculpin, I changed flies to a bigger profile dungeon. As I worked downstream, there was a section of water that was completely dark, the trees blocked out every reflection and source of light on the water. I kept targeting the bank as I moved into the dark section of water. On my third cast into the dark section of water, I felt some weight and head shakes, at which point I gave the line a solid 3 or 4 strip sets into the fish, each time pulling the fish closer to me. It didn’t take long on a 7 weight and 0X to have that fish in the net. First landed fish of the night, felt great to get one in the net. We hopped back in the boat and fished hard for quite some time without getting another bump. The lack of sleep, dehydration, and bourbon were starting to kick in but we continued to fish hard.
At one point I realized we were drifting farther and farther from the bank, I said something to Dave and realized he was asleep on the oars. He woke up and rowed me right back into position and I kept working the far bank. It was almost 4 am and the last fish we caught was at midnight, we were both struggling but kept at it. I got as close as I could to the bank with my casts, but who really knows in the dark. I started working some faster strips and finally felt a solid take. I started stripping the line hard and connected on another trout, this one had a delayed fight reaction. After the initial flurry of strip sets, he then decided to take off, I battled the fish and yelled for Dave to get the net. Half asleep and unsure of where the net was located, Dave turned on his headlamp and I was able to grab the net and land the fish.
I took the oars again and Dave was back to working the banks. He fished for the next two hours solid, casting and working the streamer almost the entire time. Finally, right before the take out point, he was able to hook into a brown trout and land it. At that point, we were excited to land that fish, but also relieved we were almost at the take out. It was a slower day of fishing that night, but we kept at it and were pretty spent. Fish or no fish, it’s always an adventure going on a night float and one of my most favorite ways to fish by far.
