the next morning we meet ugly bug crazy rainbow guide austin hopped and hit the road today we're
floating the famous bighorn good morning a short drive from casper wyoming you'll find where the
wind river turns into the legendary bighorn that's the plan for today we've launched the
boat run search for big browns rainbows and cutthroat today should be an unbelievable day
what's that bottom fly it's called a pulsating emerger
it's gonna represent one of those tricos this morning yeah it's a pretty cool pattern it has
a lot of action to it it's got a bead in the middle of it and that that hackle will pulsate
you're right those were subtle subtle they're subtle it doesn't move much
looks like you took the worm uh yep
nice fish austin beautiful good work man
nice in the hole so we've got a three fly rig system going on here with a crayfish on top
a pink worm and then an emerger underneath
here in wyoming you are allowed three flies and uh this one ate the worm so
water's a little off-colored uh pink stands out and this brown eight let's take a look at it
there we go beautiful fish to start the day no red spots on it huh oh man absolutely
beautiful great one so that was a fat fish that was a fat fish why are they like that
so up here we have unlike the the plant there's a few less fish per mile yeah and so um with
that we get uh more more food per fish obviously and so um there's less competition less fish per
mile to push those fish around and so they do they just they just feed feed feed and they are
obviously that was a testimony to to why they're bigger and so
um they just put on put on more girth per year so this is a quality fishery versus a quantity
exactly you're going to come up here you might catch a few less fish per day but they're going
to be it's worth it to come up here and and get the quality fish like that one right there perfect
so i generally like to run on multi-fly rigs tie the centerfly eye to eye however in this
situation it doesn't actually work because what happens is is it doesn't let the fly ride
naturally the hook is actually pointed down and it basically renders this fly unfishable so what i'm
going to do is i'm actually going to go against what i believe i'm going to cut this dropper off
and re-tie to the bend of the hook when i retie to the bend of the hook
that'll allow that fly to sit upright in the water column the way it's supposed to float and
we'll get a much higher hookup ratio because the fly is not sitting like that
you'll notice while we're nymphing um down the bighorn here that we've got a variety of different
kinds of currents that are in front of us and typically when you have uniform currents you
can throw in a big mend and and it should be fine but when you've got multiple currents while you're
nymphing and you want to leave that nymph in the strike zone as much as possible you want to do
it's not really a mend but it's more of an adjustment of your line so instead of throwing
line at up at an upstream or a downstream mend it's more of a pickup and a move so that that
indicator doesn't jerk and you're not moving you're moving your flies all over the place
you know you really you really want to keep those flies as drifting as naturally as
possible and that little adjustment move is a great way to do it without disturbing anything
nice beautiful
the structure that austin is having us fish is is
really interesting and the fish that we've caught today have
come off these drops so what we've done is we've lengthened our leader to be able to yeah ensure
we're going to tick a little bit as we're as we're going downstream beautiful but what's happening is
as soon as that length of leader with the weighted fly drops off that edge
these fish are picking it up and it's just tons tons that's a big rainbow beautiful
nice fish big one so it may be a little bit more difficult to fish when you've got a longer leader
on the flat before the shelf but it pays off when those flies do tumble over and the result
is in the net oh it's an older fish you can tell right away huh yeah it looks like uh ate the worm
beautiful mature fish oh my gosh that's a long
look at the tail on that fish that thing is it's got a nice paddle
so austin the worm has lit it up today but you want to make a change absolutely let's get a
little bit later in the day here and these trichos are are diminishing as we speak yeah
and so what we're going to do is we're going to take this last trico off and we are going
to put a leech on we're going to put it on as our last fly today and what that's going to do is is
the way our rig sits is our weight's going to be the lowest part of our our rig and this uh this
small mohair leech is going to be our farthest fly away from that weight and so it's going to
get more movement in the water and it's going to entice those fish a little bit to come after it
big head shakes nice you knew there was a big one i knew there was i knew it i wasn't going to be a
satisfied until uh
another worm fish another worm so we fished the inside of this seam
four times and austin said you know what let's go up and i know there's a big one in here let's go
up and do the outside of the scene and our first drift pass we see some awesome awesome rainbows