Madison River
Dam: 776 cfs
Kirby: 850 cfs
Varney: 921 cfs
The Upper Madison has still been fishing very well during the mornings and evenings, but the afternoons have been far more inconsistent. If you plan on heading out there before sun-up, the nocturnal stone action has been very productive in bringing good fish up, and we’ve been doing best on chubby chernobyls, fat alberts, other assorted foam creatures. We’ve also has some great mornings with streamers as well, and black boogie men, olive peanut envys, and barely legals have definitely been the way to go over the last few days. If you’re as glued to the USGS site as we tend to be, you might have noticed that PPL has been dropping the flows over the last week, and we are currently holding at just over 776 cfs out of the dam. With the Colder nights and afternoon thunderstorms we’ve been experiencing over the seven days, water temps are starting to peak between 68 and 69 degrees at the Kirby gauge…granted that’s not exactly “ideal,” but it’s still a lot better than the 72-74 degree bathwater that was here only a couple of weeks ago. I might be starting to sound like a broken record here, but when the afternoon heat starts pushing water temps into the high sixties, you’ll do a lot better by putting on the indicator. Some of our better nymphs have been silver, purple, and red lightning bugs, $3 Dips, Tan/Brown and Olive/Brown Pat’s Rubber legs, and Crystal serendipities. That being said, we’ve also got word from more than a few customers over the last few days of good fish being taken on small hoppers (#14-16) between Raynolds and Three Dollar Bridge, so you might want to try throwing some terrestrials at them before committing to the subsurface game.
