FLY FISHING IDAHO FOR BULL TROUT - THE ULTIMATE FISHING ADVENTURE
In this video my buddy Micah and I spent 5 days on the hunt for bull trout, because that’s what it is… a hunt. These apex predators aren’t in every hole or every run like most trout are. In fact these fish can travel over 150 miles on their yearly migration to spawn. So finding these fish isn’t half the battle.. it’s the entire battle. If you’ve ever wanted to chase bull trout this video will show you what it’s actually like… Multiple rivers were fished, dozens of flies were thrown, untold miles were hiked, we got sick, had busted ankles, camped out, slept in the back of our truck, didn’t see a paved road for over a week, and casted until our arms fell off all for one shot at America’s coolest fish. Welcome back to another video.
So here’s the thing about smallmouth… they’re not native to idaho. And they’re very aggressive fish, which means finding smallmouth in this system wasn’t a good thing. And honestly it kind of killed our confidence, especially since we continued catching them as we moved up the river.
This was a huge bummer for me, mostly because this was one of the areas I had a lot of confidence in. But finding smallmouth immediately told me I wasn’t in the right spot. In fact the only saving grace for this section of river was that as we continued later into the morning we started seeing some really nice cutthroat trout.
I think this is when I first realized catching a bull trout wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought. It took 3 days of getting my butt kicked to realize it, but what you see on social media isn’t real. A lot of times the people showing off their successful bull trout catch either got a pin dropped to them or worked their tail off, either way I can promise you it isn’t going to be easy if you’re just showing up with to idaho with a fishing rod and a dream. And honestly shame on me for seeing the photos of those big colored up bull trout and thinking it would be even remotely easy. So for now nymphing for cutthroat trout was going to have to keep me happy until we could change locations yet again.
So that’s how we got our first bull trout of the trip, by deciding to nymph for cutthroat. Which might seem backwards, but ask any diehard bull trout fisherman and they’ll tell you that catching cutthroat isn’t a bad way to find bulls. The fish are so aggressive that if a fish is in distress they’ll ofter come out to chase and even eat whatever you’re reeling in. But now we had a tough decision. After fishing around 4 river miles it wasn’t until we started coming back through that section of water that we saw a fish. And let’s not forget about the 3 guys we had ran into earlier, who said they hadn’t seen a bull in 3 days on that river. I mean they could have been lying about not seeing a bull trout. But they seemed genuine and clearly weren’t targeting them. So they didn’t seem like they had a reason to lie. Which to me added up to the fact that we had gotten really lucky, and not that we had actually found any number of bull trout. So after a bit of discussion we decided to bail on this area despite finding our first bull trout. I’m still not sure how good of a decision that was, but It just didn’t feel like we were in the zone yet. Clearly they were in that river but to find them we were going to have to access a different area, which wasn’t even remotely easy to do. So instead we hit one other creek on the way out, which was gorgeous but just to be honest with you, we caught nothing other than a handful of cutthroat trout. So we drove through the night, crashed in the back of the truck at around 2 am after I couldn’t stand to drive any more, and woke up at 5 am to finish the drive.
After I caught that fish, which might have been the best of the day, we hit a flat section of water. In retrospect knowing how many bull trout we were seeing we should have kept fishing through that flat water, but we decided to hop out and walk up further looking for another section of better water… which we never found. So that’s essentially how day 5 ended. Micah did Catch bull trout as well for those of you who are wondering, we just weren’t recording for it. Which meant we had caught 4 bull trout, double what we had in 4 days of fishing, in one solid morning. That just goes to show when you’re on them it’s a blast, but it’s not easy. Which is what I hope this video was able to portray and why I showed the 4 days of grinding that led up to this successful day of fishing. There will be a part 2 for this trip, because we actually spent 10 days total in idaho, and I ended up breaking my personal best bull trout on this trip. So stay tuned for that. And if you guys want to support the channel further check out our merch at hardmanfishing.com. Thank you guys so much for watching and I’ll catch you on the next one.
#flyfishing #outdoors #fishing #idaho #bulltrout #sports #camping #hiking #survival #nature
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