Streamer Fishing for Fall Browns

                by George Anderson

Guide Brian Sienkowski with a nice "2 footer"

Fall is a favorite time of the year for a lot of the hard-core local anglers and guides. Most of the summer anglers have left, so the fishing pressure on the Yellowstone is light and the weather is usually delightful.  You can often float a good section of the Yellowstone and see only one or two other boats all day.  You’ll have your pick of good pools to fish that haven’t been pounded by twenty other boats before you get there.  So you will have ample elbowroom and plenty of time to work over an especially good run. You'll also enjoy the natural serenity and beauty of the Yellowstone with the changing colors along the river.   The cottonwoods along the river are turning from the summer green to vibrant shades of yellow and orange. Aspen pockets higher up on the slopes of the Absaroka mountains jump out of the forest of spruce and lodge pole with their brilliant shades of yellow brought on by the cool September evenings.

The Yellowstone brown trout are turning their colors too in preparation for their spawning activities in October and November.   Big male browns turn a rich golden brown with vivid red and black and orange markings, along with an impressive salmon like hook or “kipe” at the tip of their lower jaw.  These guys look like they mean business and their aggressive nature in the fall is their downfall.  While beefing up for their later spawning activities, browns feed heavily on their favorite prey, the sculpins that inhabit the rocky riverbed.  They also will chase other trout and baitfish very aggressively, making them suckers for a well-presented streamer that swings across their holding lies.

Although the browns don’t actually begin building redds at the tails of the pools and in the side channels until mid- October through mid-November, good streamer fishing starts much earlier, usually in mid-September.

You’ll want to bring out some heavy duty weapons for this gig, like a good strong #7 or #8 weight rod, and bigger reels loaded with sink tips or sinking head lines and stout 1X or 2X tippets.  

Perhaps the best lines for fishing from a drift boat are the new RIO density compensated 15-foot sink tips, in either a type 4 or type 6 sink rate.   These will help you get a fly down quickly into 3-5 feet of water along the banks and drop offs, where the browns like to hang out, especially on brighter days.   

We’ll use a variety of streamers, from lead headed wooly buggers to various big and ugly conehead streamers in sizes from 2 down to 6.   Some of the favorites are Bow River Buggers, Olive cone head sculpins, the Whitlock Sculpins, zonkers in pearl, olive and copper, double bunnys, and also some good feather streamers like the Light and Dark Spruce matukas and the Delekta Screamers.    Rabbit fur strip flies are especially deadly.   The heavy “rabbit eel” patterns that we stock for Alaska are some of the better fall streamers along with the cone head John Barr “Slump Busters”.   This year we are stocking a far wider variety of streamers and you’ll find lots of very interesting and effective patterns for not only the Yellowstone but also the Madison, Missouri and the Bighorn rivers. 

A guided trip in late September, all throughout October and into early November will produce some hot streamer action for fall browns, especially on the darker days.   In September and early October it is still warm enough to get some great hopper fishing in mid-day through the late afternoons on bright days.   On these bright days, the best streamer action will be both early and late, just before dark. 

Some of the most fun is wade fishing the good pools where these brown stack up in preparation for their spawning activities.  Certain pools are much better than others, and the guides know which pools to hit if you like to wade fish.  When fishing streamers, we’ll often start at the top of the pool and work down towards the tail, covering a lot of water until we find the concentration of fish.   In this fishing, a 20-24 foot type 4 or 5 sinking head is perfect.   You can get the fly close to the bottom in water that is 3-5 feet deep with moderately good current speed where these big brown like to lie.   

This is fun fishing as you are casting and moving all the time.  Take a long cast, fish it out and then move down a few feet while wading hip or crotch deep.   When a good brown hits, you’ll know it, as they will slam that streamer hard enough that it feels like they might pull the rod out of your hand!    There is nothing subtle about these streamer takes!   With a heavy tippet you can let it rip and blast them with a hard strike and the fight is on.   

Since you are moving the streamer along at a fairly fast clip, the fish don’t get time to give it a close look, like they might a dead drifting nymph, so fishing a lighter tippet lighter than 2x (6-8 lb.) is pointless.   As a bonus, if you do hook that monster brown, you’ll have a much better shot at landing him, even if you have to run downstream after him or follow him with your drift boat.   Big browns love to head for banks and heavy cover like logs or downed trees, so a heavy tippet will help you put the brakes on and get a big fish turned before he cleans you out on this stuff along the bank. 

Although the primary quarry in the fall are the browns, a pleasant by-product are all the nice fat rainbows you’ll catch, especially here on the lower stretches of the Yellowstone.  Our guides will fish different stretches from Livingston all the way down to Reed Point and even below that on occasion.   There are generally fewer fish way down river, but they average much larger, and they get little fishing pressure so they are easier to catch than your average Paradise Valley trout. 

Rainbows that will often push four and five pounds are not at all uncommon in the fall, and streamers are the only way to attract these guys that are looking for a big meal like another smaller trout or whitefish.   The rule of big fly-big fish certainly applies in the fall months for both browns and rainbows.

Although streamers are usually the name of the game, don’t forget to bring a smaller rod along to fish dry flies and nymphs.  In September, there is still some great hopper fishing, and as the end of September approaches, we start seeing hatches of the fall Blue Wing Olives, or Baetis mayflies.    You’ll find pods of nice rainbows feeding on these size 18 and 20 mayflies and it is a pleasant break to catch some twelve to eighteen inch trout on drys, after chucking those big streamers all day. 

Our weather in mid- September is normally very mild with daily high temps in the 60’s and 70’s.   It can be crisp in the mornings though, and you’ll want to bring along a warm fleece or Windstopper jacket as well as a pair of warm fishing gloves.   These are more important in October, when the temps are still very pleasant but normally in the 50’s.   Normally it isn’t until late November when it stays below freezing during the day.  Of course you need to be prepared for an early season storm in October and November, but the bonus with a good overcast, nasty day is that the big browns are on the feed and out where you can get a good crack at them.  

I’ve found that HOT ACTION will warm you up in a hurry. A few nice fish hooked and pretty soon you’ve forgotten all about the wind, rain or snow flurries.  Heavier fleece pants under my Simms gore-tex G-3 waders help a lot with the colder temperatures both in and out of the water.  When it gets really nasty I dig out my Simms gore-tex Packlite rain jacket, pull on my windstopper fingerless fishing gloves, find a good warm fishing hat like Patagonia’s synchilla duck bill, and I’m back in business fighting those fall browns in comfort.