This week’s post lists the top 10 dry flies for Montana in August. We used these flies during our most recent fly fishing road trip. They worked well for us on the numerous rivers we fished in Montana and the North Fork Shoshone River in Wyoming and I wanted to share them with you.
This was the second fly fishing road trip of the summer, which ended up being 29 days in August. August is always a tough month to catch fish because many times you’ll hear those magic words “you seem to be between hatches”. I’ve heard them more than once!
I always start with flies we’ve used in past years. I use my own RiverKeeper Flies website and return to previous posts to refresh my memory about the effective flies we used.
One great way to find something that may be buried in the many posts I’ve written is to use the SEARCH function on the upper right-hand corner just below the black header. Type in any word and you’ll usually have several suggested posts. Try Purple Haze as an example. Not only will the fly pattern sheet pop up, but the posts where I mentioned fishing a Purple Haze will as well. As I said, I use this feature constantly.
In my posts, I tried to provide a list of flies that worked for us on each of the waters we fished. Yes, they are dry flies because we enjoy watching trout eat our flies and the time of year we fished, the trout certainly were willing.
Here are the top 10 flies that caught fish.
Club Sandwich
A couple of comments…
The caddis hatch was mostly over in early August, but fish continued to take caddis patterns. It just goes to show trout do have fond memories of some insects.
No, there weren’t any Callibaetis mayflies on the Madison River. We used a Callibaetis Spinner because the body color was similar to the mayfly spinners we noticed flying around. Perhaps the fly was imitating an Epeorus mayfly.
Secondly, I’ve had good success using a Morrish Hopper too. I only had a couple of smaller sizes and the larger Club Sandwich seemed to work better.
Would other flies have worked? Quite possibly, but I have confidence in these flies.
If you missed it, here are the waters I wrote about:
- Fly Fishing the Beaverhead River
- Fly Fishing the Madison River
- Fly Fishing the Boulder and Stillwater Rivers
- Fly Fishing the North Fork Shoshone
- Fly fishing the Henry’s Fork
- Wrapping Up Our Fly Fishing Road Trip
You can bet I’ll be using this information next year when I’m getting ready for another fly fishing road trip.
Enjoy…go fish!
