Alberta - Crowsnest Fly Fishing
After fly fishing lakes for a while now I finally got the itch to do some river fly fishing. The Crowsnest area has improved faster than the Bow here in Calgary so I decided to make the trip down and fish there.
My first stop in the area was at the Crowsnest Angler - the local fly fishing shop to pick up appropriate patterns 
and get some suggestions on areas to try. Apparently the stoneflies were still the main ticket on the surface so picked up some stimulators in yellow and orange. Also got the lowdown on the river and some of the nearby waters - there are so many possible areas to fish in that region! You could easily spend an entire vacation fishing that area. In nearby BC you also have the Elk river and numerous other rivers & lakes to fish all within an hours drive.
I wasted little time in getting out on the river. The flow rate data hasn’t been available for the past couple days so it was hard to say how fast things were moving. Having not fished the river before I could still tell that the river was running a little high and faster than normal. There was a light stain to the water, but visibility was well over 3 feet so shouldn’t be an issue.
I started out fishing a stimulator up top with a #14 PT nymph as dropper on the recommendation of the shop… Despite the wind and larger flies I brought out the 3wt Sage SLT - she is such a beauty and it’ll be a long time before I part entirely in favour of a 5wt 
Using the large bushy flies I noticed that line twist became an issue quickly. I took a bit of time to swap leaders and put on a 3x tapered frogs hair leader - the larger butt section helped keep the line twist to a very managable level.
With the speed of the water it was hard to get a controlled drift for any extended period of time… I also wasn’t certain what type of presentation to use with the stones - do I dead drift? twitch it? sink it? skate it? Wasn’t long before I saw some of the naturals doing their dance. They would swoop in from the trees and splash onto the surface and drift along a bit then take off. After seeing this I realized that it would make good sense to skate the fly in after the drift for a little bit. Here is a shot of the natural stones:
With my new presentation plans it didn’t take too long before I had my first little bow on. They are scrappy fish - their strength exagerated by the current made it a great fight at times. I picked off a bunch on the surface and also caught a few on the dropper. There was no shortage of fish in the 9-12" range. The fish had perfect colouration and markings too.
I found I was getting a lot of the smaller fish off this setup and presentation so I decided to switch to something else… Looking around on shore you could see shucks from emerged stoneflies so it encouraged me to try out some of my new ties - the Kaufmann Rubber legged Golden Stone. Big beadheaded mofo of a fly Looks a little neater but around the same size and weight as something McKay would use!
First cast into a overhanging bank I get a flash and tap on my fly. Good sign! Continued into the later afternoon fishing the nymph successfully.
As the evening progressed the stoneflies stopped producing and some surface action could be seen. It seemed like they were going after emergers of some sort - didn’t take long until you could see PMD’s floating around all over the place. I found that with the faster water it was really hard to get any decent drift with these smaller patterns - next time I’ll check out some other water that may be slower. In general all areas should improve over the rest of the week given our forecast. As it was, the Crow was quite hard to cross - you’d need to be very careful if decided to try. So getting into a good casting position for some of the slack water or eddy lines was quite difficult. Here’s one of the PMDs
There were also a few other flies in the air. I wasn’t able to capture any of the Western green drakes which were floating just out of reach - but I did manage to grab a little green stonefly. There were a number of these guys buzzing around. They are very small compared to the golden stones from the afternoon. I’ve seen these little green stones out in PEI also - very broad range.
I got pretty comfortable with the dropper style presentation so I’m looking forward to my next outing in that area - its a great way to fish. And having big dry flies smashed by awesome bows is definitely a nice way to spend a day
Peace,
DanJ
