Overcast day on Hemingway's Flat

Overcast day on Hemingway’s Flat

I was reminded last night how important it is to keep things in perspective when reporting on fishing conditions.

We are fully committed to honesty with this blog, probably to a fault. We’ll tell you when and where it’s good. We’ll tell you when and where it’s not. It’s a pretty simple concept.

Reporting that the fishing is slow doesn’t do a lot to bring people here but reporting that it’s great when it really isn’t is in my opinion far worse for long-term growth.

I’ve been painting a pretty rosy picture of things these last few days and I stick by those reports. If you follow our blog at all you know we tell it like it is.

I was out last night for a while and ran into a guy who told me he hadn’t caught a fish all day. He’d been out there since the early afternoon and hadn’t had a strike. He had tried a bunch of different nymphs and also threw dries at a few sporadic risers and hadn’t had any luck.

So this is the wildcard. Yes it has been really good overall but sometimes individual experience differs from the overall and this being the case if you happened to read a few Missouri River reports that were proclaiming how hot the fishing is and you came out and had a day where you got blanked then you might think the folks writing those reports were at best exaggerating but possibly even blatantly lying about fishing conditions just to get customers into their shops.

I’ll go on the record right now saying we will NEVER do that and I don’t know of anyone else who would do it either. We have all had tough days where it’s just not happening but it’s important to look at the overall conditions and the overall success or lack thereof that people are having. Guides usually put their clients on fish – they are professionals and it’s their job. We don’t base our reports strictly on what the guides are doing.

The nice thing about having a shop and lodging is that we get the whole spectrum of experience with our customers.  On any given day we’ve got total beginners and seasoned vets who’ve been fishing the Missouri forever and everything in between so we generally have a pretty good sense of what’s happening out there based on our conversations with our guests and shop customers. We get the guide reports and we’re out there fishing ourselves so we factor all of this in to our reports. If, based on all of these reports, we’re telling you the fishing is good then you can believe it really is. That being said, there’s always the chance that things will be different tomorrow and there’s also the chance that you might just have a tough day in spite of the overall conditions.

So – following this wordy disclaimer the collective report from yesterday was that things were “pretty good”. Not on fire, but good nonetheless. Good nymphing, not much on dries and a decent streamer bite.

We’ll stick with calling it good for the time being.

Give us a call at the shop for up-to-the minute reports and conditions. We are your source for the daily skinny on the MO’.