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St. Joe report

1K views 1 reply 2 participants last post by  Panhandle 
#1 ·
Just got back from 6 days on the St. Joe. I went w/ a friend who had horses and we packed in about 6 miles and made camp about a 1/2 mile from the river off of the My Creek trail. The first night we fished fairly close to camp and did pretty well on a variety of dries. No real significant hatches, but there was a decent yellow sally hatch. The next day we hiked about 3 miles up river from there to where the river starts to get more braided and fished log jams and other nice holding water. Didn't catch any real nice fish, but still did pretty well. My friend was fishing a dry/dropper rig and did well on the lightning bug dropper. That night we fished fairly close to camp with similar results on dries. The next day we fished down stream above and below the lodge. Dries and dropper were the ticket and we had a good day. The next day we did the same w/ similar results. It's hard to give much detail because we saw a smattering of bugs- yellow sallys, bwo, tricos, caddis, and even a few green drakes. We threw everthing but the kitchen sink at them, from large and small attractors to size 20 black gnats. I even fished a crane fly pattern that worked fairly well. It was significantly different from last year's trip when I mainly nymphed during the day and fished dries at night. This trip we caught 90% of our fish on dries. There was a good range of sizes of fish. We caught quite a few in the 9-12" range, but caught a good number of fish in the 15-18" range. I was surprised at how many people were fishing that high on the river. Even our first full day of fishing when we were 9 mi. from the trailhead we saw 5 other fisherman. Because there is limited good holding water, that many folks starts to make it a bit crowded. When we got there the first day I don't think there was a camping spot available from Red Ives up through Spruce Tree. It wasn't as crowded when we came down on Thursday. There actually seemed to be less pressure lower on the river. All in all it was a great trip. Beautiful weather and spectacular scenery. Highlights for me were picking up a 17-18" fish on a big attractor fishing a far current seam and catching a similarly sized fish on a Yuk bug (thanks Swala).
 
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