Recently in the summer of 2006, my father and I visited Montana in search of trout. Boy did we get trout! When not having much sucess on the firehole the first day, we smacked the fish the second day with elk hair emergers and copper john droppers. We each caught about 20 fish each between 12-16 in. after a full 8 o'clock to 8'oclock day with snack breaks in between. We only had about 3 hours to fish tommorow so we rested up. The madison wasn't producing many fish that year so we got up very early, ate breakfast and headed strait for the firehole. We found the 400 meter stretch that we had fished yesterday and got in the water at about 8:30. It was about 3 1/2 -4 feet deep the entire stretch. We had caught a couple fish each, when at about 10 o'clock all crazyness broke out. A mega hatch of little gray caddis (the biggest I've ever seen) emerged and clouded the surface of the river. The trout went nuts and I swear to god that there were so many fish rising that you for sure could't target one fish. You would simply cast wherever you felt like. In about an hours time we had caught 17 each including a 16in. cutty landed by my dad. It was the most unbelievable day of trouting that I had ever experienced. I will post pictures of the crazy hatch on my page. We returned to the firehole this past summer but everything was very slow and I saw about 4 dead trout drifting by. A week after are departure we heard that the firehole had had a huge drought and many trout were killed. Some pictures in my gallery are of me fishing the Madison this past year.
