A fellow came in “The Mountaineer” office a couple of weeks ago and said how much he likes the stories about fishing on Clear Creek. He said that he has done a lot of fishing on Sandy Creek and Beaver Creek as well.
It is still May and what used to be the most important month of the year for stream fishing in our area as the first day of stream fishing used to be the third weekend in May.
I remember old timers saying that if there were still snow drifts in the high country of the Bear Paw Mountains on the first day of fishing season, it was going to be a cold and wet summer.
When I think back to my fishing days, it was never with flies although I saw Francis Black and Al Lucke in action often and they were great fly fishermen. Francis fished in Clear Creek and Al fished in Cow Creek where no one would go with him as there were too many rattlesnakes.
The fish of the day were brook trout and rainbow trout. As I recall the rainbow had pink meat and the brookies had white meat but it could be the other way around as well.
When I fished, it was with a hook and a worm or maybe a nugget of canned corn or a grasshopper. I had luck with all of those but the tantalizing worm was always the best.
My father was not a fly fisherman either. He fished just the way I fished. He always came home with a big mess of fish even though many were cooked each morning at the cabin along with pancakes, bacon or sausage and scrambled eggs.
My dad had a fish trap line. He would keep his fish on ice when getting into town and give them away on Monday to many people he knew loved fish but did not fish anymore.
Although we all said that an eight or nine inch fish was perfect for pan frying, we were always looking for a fifteen or sixteen inch fish as they did not have as many bones and seemed to always taste better and they were much more fun to catch.
Once in a while I would fish in Billy Young’s dam or the Diamond Bar dam on Clear Creek. I did not do that a lot because why effort myself in catching giant suckers. If you just pulled this great fish to shore and thought you were hauling a large branch to shore, you had a sucker. They were not good to eat and no fun at all to catch.
These days a person can fish all year long in our Bear Paw Creeks. I think I would like that better although in the old days the first day of fishing season was a blast!
But not one time when an uncle of mine was on the Montana Fish and Game Commission and got picked up for fishing the day before fishing season started. How embarrassing for us all!
