Hating the crowds won't help; learn to work around them
“There are only two types of anglers: those in your party and the assholes.”
—John Gierach
Fly anglers love to hate crowds. Some of us wear resentment as part of the uniform, like flies in hats or floatant stains on waders. Others, however, have learned to make peace with the fact that other people also like to fish and have just as much right to be there as you do. If you’re going to fish a popular river, you have three options: work within the crowd, work around the crowd, or let the crowd ruin your trip. You decide.
Johnnie McClure has spent 21 seasons guiding the Upper Madison. Those 55 miles absorb the most angling days of any river in Montana (a state that’s not short on trout rivers) yet Johnnie rarely guides anywhere else. “I’d say I do about 90% of my days between Raynold’s Pass and Clute’s Landing. It’s the most consistent river around here, in my opinion. It's ridiculous when you crack the code here. You can go into a hole and you might have 40 or 50 fish in there and it’s like every other cast.”
Cracking that code requires a level of intimacy. It takes time and effort, but is more achievable than people think. Johnnie has a few recommendations for anglers who want to find success on popular rivers like the Upper Madison. Those rivers are usually popular for good reason.
Approach it in pieces, not as a whole
When Johnnie talks about the Madison, he talks about it in sections: Quake to Raynolds, Raynolds to Pine, Pine to Lyons, Lyons to Palisades, Palisades to Ruby, etc., all the way down to Ennis Lake. Each stretch fishes differently, sometimes dramatically so.
The first key to decoding a big, popular river is to break it down into digestible chunks. Some holes hold dozens of fish. Water that looks identical a half mile downstream might hold almost none, usually because of substrate or some subtle shift in current that makes it less hospitable. You only learn that distinction by putting in the time.
Focus on a single section and really get to know that water. Fish it repeatedly until you start to learn its nuances, tricks, and secrets. “Start with five miles of river,” he suggests. “Break it down piece by piece, then fish the other side.”
Start subsurface
Johnnie almost never nymphs these days (he and his clients fish streamers and dries almost exclusively) but when he first started out, nymphing was essential for figuring out where the trout congregated. “Nymphing’s the best way to get to know a river and to get to know fish densities. If they're not rising, they're not rising, but they're usually eating something, and you wouldn’t know that unless you’re nymphing.” Understanding where the fish actually live on a given stretch of water is a prerequisite for all future success.
Once you know where trout like to hold in a certain stretch of river, you can start to eliminate other variables like pattern, size, or depth. “With nymphing, I kind of use the first couple holes as a laboratory. I’m not going to fish the same rig 25 times through good water and expect a fish to eat on the 26 th cast.”
The fly matters
Conventional wisdom says presentation matters more than pattern. Johnnie agrees with the first half. “Presentation—yes, most important.” He pauses, then adds, “but goddamn, the fly matters.” Not just pattern either. Size, color, even wire shade can be variables that meaningfully impact success.
“I carry 15 or 20 different blue winged olive nymphs in my box,” he says, “and that’s just BWO nymphs, not emergers.” The key is to be willing to change and change often.
“I change flies religiously. Once you’ve kind of gridded it out and you’re not seeing results, you’re doing something wrong. It’s usually you’re not presenting them the right way or you’re not feeding them what they’re actually eating. You might change seven, eight, nine, 10 nymph rigs.” That’s 20 different flies, if you’re counting. “Then on the 21 st you crack it.”
But don’t get stuck on a pattern just because you start catching fish on it. He can count on one hand the number of days he’s gone ramp to ramp on the same flies. What’s working in one stretch won’t necessarily continue to produce 200 yards downstream. “What’s so interesting to me is how different all the micro environments are. You can go two miles and they’re on tons of caddis pupa, and then you go down and there’s something else is going on. If you can get half an hour or 45 minutes out of a nymph, that's pretty good. And then inevitably that drift or that hatch changes and it moves on and then failure again. Okay, well, that's not working. What else we got? I think it's just about having the drive to do it. It’s deductive reasoning.”
Don’t fish eight to five
On heavily guided rivers (like the Upper Madison) the vast majority of the traffic follows standard work hours. If you’re putting in between eight and ten am, you’re going to be in a crowd, but if you go a few hours earlier or later, you can usually work around the crowd.
“If you're going to do eight to five, you're going to see people. I go early, I go late. I'd rather be on the water between 5:30 to 6:30, or go behind everybody and get on the water at 11:00 and fish to dark.”
Have backup plans
Solitude on the Upper Madison is not a myth. Johnnie finds it regularly—not just by fishing at odd hours, but by being willing to explore. “It’s amazing how many people pigeonhole themselves into the familiarity of an area,” he says. He’s taken clients to sections below eight-mile who’ve been fishing the Madison for 25 years and never been there. “You can just keep driving down river till you find someplace where you don’t see a car. You can do that every month of the year, every week of the year. You can do it during the Fourth of July.”
His approach is simple: have a plan A, but go all the way to plan Z if you need to. Keep driving until you find water that isn’t being hit hard. “Popular rivers are popular for a reason—they have a lot of fish. There’s generally going to be fish just about anywhere you go.”
He also trades productivity for solitude deliberately, and finds that the trade-off isn’t always a trade-off at all. The stretches with lowest fish numbers sometimes hold the biggest fish in the system.
Define success for yourself
For Johnnie, a good day means one big fish. That’s where he is in his fishing life right now, but definitions of success are subjective. The anglers who struggle most on popular rivers are often the ones who haven’t asked themselves that question honestly.
What is success?” he says. “It’s completely subjective to your expectations about what is possible and what you are out there to do.” Someone who hasn’t touched a fish in a month might find three fish in an afternoon genuinely extraordinary. Someone who knows what the Madison’s best days look like might find the same three fish unremarkable. Neither response is wrong, but going in without a clear sense of what you’re after makes it harder to set yourself up for it.
Unsurprisingly, Johnnie methodically prepares for success. Start with a clear goal, then create a plan around that goal. Going after big fish on streamers? Get on the water before sunrise and fish hard until 9 AM. Hunting a hopper eat? Don’t rush the morning. “Set yourself up for success for what you want to do.”
The one thing he doesn’t do is quit. “I don’t push out. I don’t give up. I love being out there.” After 21 seasons, the process itself is the point. Figuring out what they won’t eat on a day when you already know what they will. Trying the fly someone made out of a sock, just to see.
“Enjoy the process,” he says. “And don’t prolong your certainty, because it’s always going to change.”