Coeur d'Alene Fishing Report 06.28.18
Coeur d'Alene River
Flow 871 cfs and dropping at Cataldo. Flows are now about at normal summer flows. What a great spring we have had with plenty of water and great fishing! It is now coming into summer and our styles of fishing will be changing. The May fly activity will now have the trout's attention every day. So, the Pale Morning Dun hatches are more solid and consistent. Starting to see a few Grass Hoppers out and plenty of ants and beetles too. These will get more and more prevalent as it warms up and the grasses dry out. Many more caddis out too. The evening hatches with Rusty spinners, Pale evening duns and Caddis will be the players in the afternoons and evenings. The streamer fishing and nymphing is still good and you should be running nymphs and streamers if you are not seeing any surface activity. Running a soft hackle or a caddis pupae behind an x-caddis or elk hair caddis in the afternoon will get the job done.
St. Joe River
Flow 2,080 cfs and dropping at Calder. Fishing is killer right now and the water is ideal. We are supposed to be a touch cooler this week which is just fine. Partly cloudy and in the upper 60's and 70's. This is perfect weather for fishing now. This will keep the water temps down and the fish active. We floated the Joe yesterday. It was excellent. The streamer fishing was fantastic. No need to throw big streamers as they were getting lots of refusals. So, the smaller Sculpin patterns like Near Nuffs or Sculpzillas are great choices. The dry fly fishing was ok, but it could have been better. It was very windy and I believe this had a lot to do with the so-so dry fly fishing. We did catch several on top but had to work for them. Smaller offerings seemed to be better than big stoneflies, or what we were fishing just a week ago. Try Para Wulfs in 10's and 12's or good ol' Humpies or Stimmulators in orange. There are plenty of PMD's, a few Western yellow May flies too, Caddis, a few straggler Green Drakes as well. Nymphing was just ok, not great, yesterday but we did get a few on bead head Pheasant tails. I think this had to do with the weather more than anything, it seemed like a front was pushing through, and when this happens it can throw things off a bit. It looks like it will be a pretty consistent week of weather though so, the Joe should fish just fine.
Clark Fork River (MT)
Flow 25,900 cfs at St. Regis and dropping. If this river goes back up I'm going to lose my mind! I don't think it will so, in a week or so it should be fishing. I like to see flows around 16,000-15,000 cfs at St. Regis before I get too excited.
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