Snake River Update and Thailand Fly Fishing

I hope everyone has had a great winter. My apologies for my delay in posting, I’ve been busy trying to get into nursing school and was unsure of what my guiding schedule would be like for the year. I now know what nursing program I will be attending and I can safely book trips this summer through August. I may be able to guide a number of trips this September, but it will depend on the dates so please contact me if you do have any interest. Fishing in the area has been excellent recently. I was just out on the Snake yesterday and the river was alive with activity. The fish are keying in on midday hatches of Skwala Stoneflies, midges, and some blue winged olives mixed in. We’re getting a good amount of surface activity with the fish podding up to feed. We’ve had some great sight fishing recently, both with dry flies and sight nymphing. You can pull into area and see the fished stacked up, often hanging a couple feet below the surface. I’ve been fishing to these fish with dry dropper rigs, sometimes they eat the dry and sometimes they eat the nymph, but either way it’s a very visual experience. The fishing should stay good until runoff hits, so if you can get out there now I would do it. As far as my recent fishing goes it has been largely focused on the Snake. I wish that I been able to fish some other rivers in the area, but I’ve been busy with other things. I did get to spend the last few weeks traveling around Thailand on my belated honeymoon. My wife and I had a great time and she even let me spend a day fly fishing in Thailand. I had initially wanted to fish Cheow Lan Lake, a large reservoir located in a national park in Thailand, for Giant Snakeheads, but in talking to the guide service in the area it sounded like it was a very poor time of year for it. Instead, a friend of mine who also happened to be in Thailand on his honeymoon, joined me for a day of lake fishing for some introduced, non-native species. It was a great experience but not what I would consider an incredibly wild and sporting trip. They have these ponds that, at one point in time, were stocked with these Amazonian Red-Tailed catfish and Arapima. These fish have since done quite well in the lake and have grown to impressive sizes with some of the Arapima reaching over 200lbs. Unfortunately we weren’t able to land any of the Arapima, we would see them roll with some frequency and gulp air off the surface, my buddy did manage to hook one but it ended up throwing the hook. We did manage to catch quite a few of the Red-tailed catfish that were in the lake including some large specimens. I managed to get one that was around 45lbs and my buddy Pat landed one that weighed in at 25 kilos which is about 55lbs. I’ll try to post some pictures as soon as I get them off of Pat’s camera. Right now I’m off to the Florida Keys to do a little tarpon fishing with my Dad before the guide season really picks up. That’s the beauty of the off-season in Jackson, everything shuts down so you have a lot of time to travel around. Hopefully in the next couple weeks I’ll be able to post some pictures of some nice tarpon on the fly and maybe some trout fishing pictures from the Jackson area. I hope everyone is enjoying their spring weather and I’ll see you this summer!