MONTANA WATERS IN JEOPARDY

It’s a highly unusual year in Montana this year as all the fishing is already approaching late season water flows yet the major hatches have yet to come off.  The Salmon fly hatch was two weeks late on Rock Creek, and my home river the Missouri is at low flows but with seasonal hatches not coming off in regular timing cycles, unusual to say the least.   And now the whole Madison drainage in Yellowstone National Park is on hoot owl restrictions, which means no fishing after two pm on any given day…

The water temperatures are 68 degrees plus on the Firehole, the Gibbon and the Madison in the park and its only June 19.  this is two months early on a hot year, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg, pun intended.  There’s no iceberg here, and to add to the confusion, there is a storm arriving this weekend which will put a foot of snow into Glacier Park.  Global warming, no, lack of snowpack, and poor runoff management. Usually, Montana does a great job of controlling the Missouri River Drainage through a series of dams that keeps all the rivers healthy, fills the reservoirs and keeps stable water temperatures and oxygen levels in line with good trout survival rates.  And the fish are already getting pounded to death.

Last Monday, I got to fish for the first time on the Missouri so I went upriver, found a great stretch of water that I have fished for over 30 years and taken a gazillion fish from, 80 degrees and no wind.  Perfect, I thought as I waded out to a slot with 20 fish working on drifting PMD nymphs or stillborns.  Four or five of these fish were over 20″ and well within casting range.  An hour later, I had made a hundred perfect casts with 5 different flies and didn’t get a take, probably because I was too lazy to change my leader size to 5x tippet.  These fish were late August leader shy already and over fished so here’s the note of caution… 

Too much fishing pressure even on big rivers like the Missouri is damaging the fisheries like never before.  These fish are stressed out from too much pressure but have adapted to the subtlety of feeding rhythm they need to survive, but it can’t go on forever.  Pretty soon, as the waters warm up, the weed beds will bloom, and the oxygen level will go down and these healthy fish will become oxygen depleted, weak, and could die.  Does this scare you, it scares me, and I’m relatively fearless.  The water wars are accelerating at an alarming pace, and this country had better realize it while we still have water to manage.

Background Explanation 

Blogs deal with whatever is on my mind that day.   I usually write about life in general through a specific topic about a subject of the moment, because the moment is all we have.  Now is for the takin’, the past is for the forsaken, and the future is for the askin’.  The past is dead, and the future is not here yet and may never be either because you may be dead in the next moment. Try to get the best out of today, because it’s all we will ever have, the here and now.

We are all subject to “The Path Of The Stray Bullet”, which is a piece I wrote many years ago and can be found in my first book, Derelict-us Ameri-can-us? Everything I write is joined at the hip to everything else I talk about.  There is a loose connectedness to all this divergence; it is up to you to put the pieces together, and if they fit, then use em’ or lose em’.  Ideas not actualized are useless; there’s no substance there.

The Path of the Stray Bullet is presented here so that you can get a feel for a new way of life.  It is fiction but has a moral objective at its central core.   It counteracts  the media driven world we live in where we are buried in the muck of a million different takes of a million different sound bites which we can’ t digest because we are living in the past, looking for the future and worrying ourselves to death in the process.  We are dominated by our perspective of time, and our time spatial relationship is out of kilter so we wander around in the now, yet cling to the past, while seeking a better tomorrow.  We are only here today.   There is only now.  There is no tomorrow.  If it feels good do it, but do it for you, not someone else.  How can you do something for someone else, when you don’t even know who you are?