Hebgen Dam 1110cfs
Old Kirby Place 1100cfs
Varney Bridge 1180cfs
Lower Madison 1620cfs
I’m going to do this fishing report thing kinda quick. It’s hopper season. Fish a hopper. Maybe add an ant or moth or beetle if you’d like to get fancy. Waters good, temps are good, fish are bigger and they’re plentiful. That’s it. Until it gets cold. Enjoy it while it lasts. See you in the fall.
It has been one of the best grasshopper years on the Madison River in a very long time. Not that you’d know from my river reports. As there were still mayfly and Caddis hatches the last time I sat down to do this. Well it has not really been that long as we had a pretty great grasshopper season last year too. But seriously, the last really crazy good hopper year might have been 2003 or 2004.
We have been blessed with a bountiful late summer abundance of grasshoppers and as gardener I don’t really like them but interestingly enough I don’t get them by the thousands in downtown Ennis. But if you’re a gardener on flats and most other areas of the valley you are inundated with them. Sucks to be a gardener sometimes. It’s good to be both a gardener and an angler. That way we can go fly fishing and fish the hopper plagues and feel better about how many hundreds of thousands of them there are in the Madison Valley right now eating all your leafy vegetables.
Look for those windy days. Those are almost always going to be the best hopper fishing days. South winds are easiest to fish in. North winds will create similar bites but are harder to throw casts into. But that’s why you have me. I’ll teach you how.
We have had steady warm afternoons and as long as that continues we will have grasshoppers around. We did also have our first cold front in some time about 5 days ago and those will start showing up more over the coming weeks. I even fished streamers all afternoon that day and it was decent. That’s what I’ll do when they come. But I will also look for the warm up and the winds after any cold snap to revive that hopper bite and many times with a new intensity. It’s not a bad cycle to be in.
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Thanks again for tuning in and as always keep your tip up.
Brian Rosenberg