Henry’s Lake Fly Fishing with Darren Huntsman (Littoral Zone #23)

Littoral Zone #23 Transcript 00:00:00 Phil: Welcome to the Littoral Zone podcast. I’m your host, Phil Rowley. The Littoral zone, or shoal area of the lake, is a place where the majority of the action takes place. My podcast is intended to do the same, put you where the action is to help you improve your Stillwater fly fishing. On each broadcast, I, along with guests from all over the world, will be providing you with information, tips and tricks, flies, presentation techniques, along with different lakes or regions to explore. I hope you enjoy today’s podcast. Please feel free to email me with your Stillwater related fly fishing questions and comments. I do my best to answer as many as we can prior to each episode, just before the main content. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed today’s show. I’m often asked what my favorite lake is to fish. The answer to this question is tough because there are just so many factors to consider. My response would be similar to what my favorite fly is. Frankly, there’s no clear answer. There are many factors to consider. If it were purely about the largest fish, it might be Argentina’s Jurassic Lake. However, I also have many lakes with fond memories of spending time with family and friends. And they could also make my list. Lakes that offer extremely challenging conditions that test my skills also place these lakes amongst my favorites. Once again, there is no clear good answer. Many lakes fall onto my Favorites lakes list. One of these lakes is Idaho’s Henrys Lake. Henry’s Lake offers scenic beauty. Challenging conditions, the opportunity for huge fish, and numerous memories. Today’s guest, Darren Huntsman, also shares my love for Henrys Lake, Idaho. Born and raised. Darren has spent not just hours exploring and learning the nuances of Henrys Lake, but years. I invite you to join Darren and me as we discuss how he first started fly fishing, his love for Stillwater fly fishing, in particular Henry’s Lake and the flies and presentation techniques he uses throughout the season. You will find that Darren’s approach, strategies, flies, and presentation techniques also work on other lakes as well. But before I talk with Darren, I want to respond to a question from Tim Carpenter. Today’s podcast question is a good one and one that, frankly, could spawn numerous episodes all on their own. Tim Carpenter asks, and he has many questions, but his main question is, how do I know when to use which line in which situation? Floating with bobber indicator, midge tip, slow, fast, sinking, etc.? Again, a great question and as I mentioned a few seconds ago, one worthy each of their own episode. Now, thankfully, I already have recorded a couple of episodes, a two part series entitled Making Sense of Stillwater Fly Lines. You can check those out early in my podcast library. But, uh, again, the choice is when you get to Stillwater, fly fishing, if you’re coming from moving waters, the sheer volume of lines available to you can be a little overwhelming. You know, there’s lines, you know, different types of floating lines, whether you’re fishing dries, um, you want a different line for that, whether you’re fishing indicators or long liters, you’re going to need a line that’s better designed for turning over that mask. Basically oversized heads and short front tapers with the mass pushed towards the tip of the line to help push all that over. And then, of course, you’ve got your midge tips and your emerger tips and your hover lines and your clear intermediates and all your different sinking lines. Then you’ve got sweep lines or parabolic lines, and then you’ve got lines that may not be designed specifically for still waters, but they have great Stillwater applications sometimes fly fishers don’t understand or realize these lines are available because of the brackets. They’re put in on a fly line, company website or the names they use to help sell and market them, but they all have a place. But what I would recommend as a core of lines, every Stillwater fly Fisher should have is a floating line that’s best designed for fishing, subsurface for using indicators, and for fishing long leaders and weighted names. You got to remember we don’t get the surface activity generally that river and stream anglers get. All the fishing is typically done subsurface. So that’s why you want those lines that are best suited for casting indicator rigs, long leaders, weighted flies. Then you’d want a line that’s a clear intermediate, something that sinks at about one and a half to two inches per second. This is a great line for trolling around if you like to do that. For fishing nymphs and streamers and leeches shallow. You can also fish Chironomid pupa with it. Very versatile line. And then you’d want some sort of fast sinking line, either from a type three sync rate, perhaps down to a type seven. And that choice is going to be based a little bit on the depth of the local waters. You’re going to fish if you’re going to fish a lot of deep lakes with not much shallow shoal area, then you’re probably going to want to fish something in that type five type seven line that sinks anywhere from five to seven inches per second. But if your lakes are predominantly shallow, like Henrys Lake, we’re going to talk to you about on today’s episode, which is the deepest part is less than twenty feet deep and often averaging even less than that. Then a type three line is probably more than enough line for that lake. So a tough question. Sorry if I didn’t answer it specifically, but each of these questions within a question that Tim had are worthy of their own episode. And I’m going to commit to doing episodes on indicator fishing, uh, situations. You’d want to use that in episodes on fishing long leader naked technique Midge tips arguably one of the most misunderstood fly lines out there. Lots of different applications for that line. And I also did an episode as well on sinking line techniques, so I encourage Tim and everyone else to check out that episode. Going deep, sinking line strategies and tactics for Still Waters. So I hope in a roundabout way, I gave some insight to Tim’s question. It’s a tough one to answer because there’s just so much good answers to all of those questions, and trying to get it down to one simple yes no black and white answer, unfortunately, isn’t always easy because a lot of times it’s situationally specific and many times a line may have a specific purpose but also has secondary purposes. You can use it for as well. For example, you can use a midge tip to fish dry flies. Um, so again, that would be something I would cover in the tip episode. So hopefully I shed some light on that. Um, Stillwater fly lines can be a little daunting, a little overpowering, a little confusing, a little intimidating. You don’t need all of those lines. I look at them as kind of golf clubs, if you will. Well, you have the core set of clubs you can get around most golf courses with. So again, that would be your floating line designed for fishing indicators and long leader weighted nymphs. Then that clear intermediate that sinks at about two inches per second, and then some sort of fast sinking line from a type three three inches per second. Type five five inches per second, or a type seven seven inches per second. The best suits the syncing needs you envision you’re going to use it on, and then once you get comfortable with those lines, then you can start looking at the other ones and start filling in the blanks. And they’re going to help you out in those specific sort of Nietzsche presentation challenges. You’re going to face that, that line. Maybe it’s a midge tip, maybe it’s a sweep is going to be a better line choice for you. But one thing you want to remember is whenever you buy a fly line, learn how to use it. Get familiar with it. So you’re going to pull it out and use it as much as you can. There’s no point in buying a fly line. It’s just going to sit at home in your kit bag, in a pocket, in your float tube or pontoon boat, and you’re never going to pull it out. And the best time to figure out how to use a fly line is when you’re on the water and the fishing is good. They’re active. They’re willing to eat the fly. Maybe you’re catching them a lot on strike indicators. Maybe it’s time to maybe pull out a midge tip, or just use that floating line with a long leader and a set of weighted nymphs and see if you can catch them that way. Because once you get the experience of fishing those lines and having some success, then the next time you’re on the water and things aren’t going as well, then you’re more likely to pull out these different lines, these different techniques, and give them a try to see if they’re going to unlock the puzzle, because it’s no good trying something you’ve never done before in a situation that is not working like it’s slow fishing, that’s not really the time you want to experiment with a different technique or a different line you’re not familiar with, because if you’re not successful, you don’t know whether it was the line, your technique, the fish, or a combination of all three. So I hope that helps. And again, I commit because I’m always looking for good ideas for future podcasts. And that’s what these questions often create. So again, great question from Tim. And if you have any additional questions you can think of, please don’t hesitate to reach out and email me through my email address at Sean. Or you could send a question through my Instagram, Phil Rowley fly fishing or my Facebook page, Phil Worley fly fishing or Phil at Phil really fly fishing dot com through my website. Phil Rowley fly fishing. So lots of ways to get to me get those questions to me and hopefully I can help you out. And now on to our podcast. All right, Darren, thanks for joining me on my Littoral Zone podcast. It’s an honor to have you here. And it’s important because I think we’re talking about one of my favorite still waters here. And Henry’s Lake and Wyatt deserves a deep dive. It’s got a pretty incredible legacy as a trophy. Stillwater trout fishery and many anglers from all over North America go to visit it, and I’m sure from other parts of the planet. And of course, it’s a personal favorite with you because it’s just up the road from where you live. So why don’t we get into a little bit about yourself, tell us a little bit about Darren Huntsman and where he came from, and how did he end up falling in love with Henry’s Lake like I have? 00:10:08 Darren: Cool. Thanks, Phil. Thanks for having me on. 00:10:10 Phil: Oh you’re welcome. 00:10:11 Darren: You’re one of my idols. Fish with you for a couple of weeks over the last couple of years. It’s fun to visit with you. 00:10:18 Phil: Yeah. So talk about Darren. Let’s talk about Darren first. So your native idahoan. Is that the right way? I am, yeah. 00:10:25 Darren: Born and raised. My mom and dad had a place down just outside of Shelley, Idaho, just south of Idaho Falls. Okay. And luckily we were right on the snake River there. Not better places for a kid to grow up. 00:10:40 Phil: That’s a pretty good body of water. 00:10:42 Darren: Uh, yeah. Good place to tromp around. I was really lucky because my dad was a hunting and fishing fanatic, and by the age of about six, I was his shadow. And I was lucky because I’ve seen a lot of guys out boats and different things like that with kids and their patients run stints sometimes. I probably, mine included. He wanted us to learn and he taught us, and it just absolutely thrilled him to see us grasp things and then be able to do them on our own. Yeah. And so, yeah, I was really lucky in that way. 00:11:16 Phil: And always fly fishing. Or did you start gear and transmit to fly or fly fishing right from the start? 00:11:22 Darren: Well, some of my earliest fly fishing memories was we had a memory or a, a reservoir that’s just west of us that my granddad loved. It’s called Mackey Reservoir. And as kids, we’d go out and we’d jump in the boat, all the cousins and we’d go out and we’d, you know, put that worm six feet under our bobber and then stand there or sit there in the boat and watch that bobber. And my dad, as soon as he got all us kids situated, he’d grab his fly rod and stand in the bow of the boat and start casting. And I could still remember almost every time we’d go out there, the bigger fish was always off the fly rod underneath the surface. And that just stuck with me all through growing up through the bobber days. And then when I finally got my first fly rod when I was probably seven or eight. And I remember catching my very first fish on a fly rod, putting it on a paper plate in the fridge, and my mom and dad were out, and I put it in there so that when they came home, they’d see it. And from then on it was. Yeah, fish, fish, fish, fish, fish. 00:12:27 Phil: Yeah. And what led you to Henry’s? How did you get. Because that’s arguably your favorite body of water. Now, is that fair to say? 00:12:33 Darren: It is. My dad was a salmon and steelhead angler. He loved big fish, and that’s what got him fly fishing in the lakes that we would fish as kids. And so seeing those big fish, just that’s what I wanted to chase all the time, was big fish. And that got into salmon and steelhead. I got an opportunity to go to Alaska and spend a couple of weeks every year for twenty years up there, because we lost our runs down here in Idaho. So we’d go up there and chase the big fish. Then we ran into problems up there because of the the ocean conditions and the trawling, the ocean fishing out there. And so now we’re back to really no runs to fish for. And so we started looking for big fish again. And that’s just stillwater’s period. 00:13:20 Phil: Yeah. And specific Henry’s, which is again, as we said earlier, one of North America’s most hallowed Stillwater fisheries. So let’s talk about Henry’s as well itself. So it’s located just North Island Park, right? So for those of those out there, the two people that are listening. 00:13:37 Darren: Yeah. The parrot beak or the little just the little knob right there in the centennials. Just barely, I guess you’d call it north of Island Park proper and then south of West Yellowstone. So yeah, right there on the divide between Montana and Idaho. 00:13:55 Phil: Yeah. Northern Fremont County. It’s pretty big lake. It’s over six thousand acres. 00:13:59 Darren: So yeah, it’s it’s big when you get out on it. You know, when you compare it to some of the other lakes, you know, I love to go down to pyramid. When you compare those two, it’s there is no comparison, however. Yeah. For a lake the size. That you want to go out and be able to explore in a weekend. Henry’s is the perfect size. 00:14:18 Phil: And it’s nestled in in the intersection of three valleys, right? 00:14:23 Darren: Yeah. You basically have four different passes that come in. And what makes those passes so important is. Those are the wind channels for that, for our lake. And so any direction, you know, north west, southeast there. That wind can hit you from any direction because it sits in that little plateau. 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You can go to San Juan dot com, that’s S a n j u a n road works dot com. 00:15:49 Phil: Yeah, because it was unique when we fished it last year, twenty twenty five, the fall of twenty twenty five. It was I remember one day we were at the county launch, right. And it was calm. We went over near the state launch and it was blowing pretty good. And it was this little sort of dividing line about halfway across the lake. It was kind of unique how that went around. So its elevation is quite high over six thousand feet. I think it says six thousand four hundred and seventy in my notes here. And so that’s pretty high. So that means it fishes well throughout the season right? Pretty well if you do dry spots in the warm summer about it. 00:16:26 Darren: When we have our high temps in late July and August. There are a lot of places in that lake where those fish can find refuge from the high surface temperatures, and we get temperatures that will push that seventy degree mark. But if you get around, you can find those spring fed areas where the fish will congregate because of that warmer water. And yeah, that could be really fun. 00:16:49 Phil: Yeah, yeah. And the fish in there, you’ve got Yellowstone cutthroat Brookies and the hybrids, which everybody really likes because those are the, those are the ones that get particularly big. How based on is the population right now? How is it doing? Are they up, down or is there one doing better than the others? 00:17:08 Darren: It’s coming back. I think we’ve seen our low spot and we’re starting to come back. About three or four years ago, we. Yeah, our population was pretty small. Our net counts every spring, fish and game puts out nets during the night, and they get counts out of those nets. not only fish population, but also what species and what the population densities of those are. Besides the three species of trout or subspecies of trout that you mentioned, we also have the Utah chub in there and they’re growing in number. They compete with the trout as far as that goes. They, you know, they’re they’re a pain in our fannies when we hook them. As far as that goes. But they’re also a food source for these fish too, so it’s hard to say. Oh, I don’t want those Utah chubs in there when they’re actually a benefit. 00:17:59 Phil: Yeah. Because they’re they’re definitely. And that’s part of the reason those fish get so big. Plus it’s a pretty productive body of water, isn’t it? 00:18:06 Darren: Yeah. You can have no bait fish in there. And those fish would grow to the sizes they are. The bug life in that lake is astounding. 00:18:14 Phil: I know it reminds me of a lake I fished many years and still do in British Columbia called Tonquin. Obviously not as big as Henry’s, but the same basic average depth, very shallow. It’s a giant shoal or littoral zone to throw a plug in there. And it’s like Henry’s just bug rich, full of Scuds and damsels. And it just amazes me when I go there. The weed growth and the the amount of food life that those fish have to eat on. All the food groups are represented there from the Utah chub, as you mentioned, all the way down to the smallest of chironomid. So there’s lots of them to eat there. So, um, I guess just like. And what, who’s the Nate named after? It’s after a. 00:18:56 Darren: It’s after a fur trader, uh, by the name of Andrew Henry. 00:19:00 Phil: Yeah. That’s it. Yeah. And it was, was it always in that state or was it damn somewhat. And levels brought up. How was it. 00:19:08 Darren: Yes. It had a dam put in in the early nineteen twenties, nineteen twenty three. And it basically doubled the level of the lake. So it averaged somewhere around six to eight feet before the dam max level was probably about twelve. Now we average about twelve feet with the max level. Max depth about twenty one twenty two feet, depending on what your water level is on the lake. 00:19:32 Phil: And yeah, there’s lots of what I liked about the lake is it’s all the famous little places that you know, where you’re getting the fish at the names of the, you know, the cliffs, um, you know, by Staley’s and I always like, I, you know, you don’t always see that on lakes, but that lake has quite a historic culture, um, behind it. 00:19:51 Darren: So a very historical culture. I was actually the other day, I found an article in fly fishing magazine back in nineteen seventy talking about Henry’s Lake, and it was really cool. It was written by a guy, Dick Gomer. 00:20:08 Phil: Dick. Okay. 00:20:09 Darren: Yep. And it talks about it anyway. It’s really interesting because they call it the lake because they said, you can take any other Stillwater, you can take all of the rules that you know for all of the other stillwaters and lakes and throw them out the door, because it’s not going to come to, you know, it’s not the same at Henry’s. 00:20:31 Phil: It is different. I will admit that the first time I went, it was a little puzzling. It didn’t quite behave like other lakes. I’m familiar with it, you know, it’s lakes are lakes, so they have their similarities, but it’s definitely got a, a heartbeat and a pulse of its own. Um, the other guy I was thinking of was Marv Taylor. Um, he wrote a book, fly rods, float tubes and other essays, and he had the old del cante float tubes that you would, uh, fill up by just sweeping a little, basically a bag through the air and gather that, roll that up and squeeze, transfer that air you gathered into the float tube and put them up. And, uh, and those are the old float tubes that look like old toilet seats. There was not a lot. I don’t know how anybody. 00:21:09 Darren: On an inner tube. 00:21:10 Phil: Yeah, the old truck tubes now they’ve come, you know, quite, you know, float tubes and other water inflatable watercraft have come quite a ways. Um, so let’s talk about when you’re when you’re fishing Henry’s, we talked about the species of fish. And, you know, there’s those hybrids. That is the sort of the trophy fish there, isn’t it? That’s what you and I ran into last fall. Um, I was telling who was I talking to today. I was telling somebody about. We were moving. Um. Oh, it’s Howard Croston. I was talking to Howard Croston. I was doing another podcast, um, with him. Don’t worry. There’ll be links to that in the show notes. Um, and, uh, just telling him about you and I were, you know, we had plans to go down to, uh, where are we going to go? It was down the east side. 00:21:52 Darren: Chesterfield. 00:21:53 Phil: Yeah. And, um, there was, we just kept running across as we pushed through the shallows, just those hybrids scattering everywhere. And we were like, I think we better stop. And those fish were in less than four feet of water, weren’t they? Just in and amongst the weeds? It was challenging because of the dealing with the weeds. We could, you know, your little, uh, we’ll talk about flies in a bit, but your little crystal bugger unweighted. That little brown one, that’s just so simple, but it’s so deadly. And that was so much fun. Just fishing a midge tip hover or a hover line if you could. And that’s anything heavier. You were just gardening all day. So it’s uh, those fish were I was impressed how the average had come back up because we were getting, I think what, what we were the one I got was about nine pounds, wasn’t it? We, we did, we managed to weigh the one that. 00:22:42 Darren: Yeah, you gotta add another pound to that because that scale was already part of my net. So it was nine point one. 00:22:49 Phil: Yeah. I remember the panic weighing it because somebody says it’s in kilograms. I said, don’t worry, I got an iPhone. We’ll figure it out, you know, because we’re, you know, we’re worried about the welfare of the fish and trying to figure the scale out. And it’s like kilogram. We can work with that. We got a measurement. So yeah. All right. So based on that, let’s talk about your gear. What’s your favorite? What fly rods do you like as far as weights and lengths, those kind of things. What would somebody, what kind of fly rod would somebody need to bring to the Henrys. 00:23:15 Darren: Uh, definitely at least a six week. My favorite is a ten foot six weight. I’ve got a bunch of buddies that fish a ten foot seven weight. Not necessarily because every fish that you’re going to catch is going to be big enough to play with on a seven weight, but sometimes that wind can get blowing a little bit. And if you want to throw a longer line, which is to me very important, when you’re fishing still waters, it makes sense to throw a little bit heavier line. 00:23:39 Phil: Yeah, it does. It let the tool do the job, right? 00:23:42 Darren: Yeah, absolutely. 00:23:43 Phil: You know, years ago when I was young and full of energy, I’d fish five weights a lot. But as you get older, it’s like, you know what, let’s let the tool do the job. And and, uh, yeah, sixes and sevens. You like long rods? Short rods. 00:23:55 Darren: I do well, to an extent. I like a ten foot. Yeah. My son likes a ten and a half foot. Ten and a half. Just a little bit too much rod for me to throw all day long. And yeah, usually when I fish, I like to fish all day long. 00:24:07 Phil: Yeah, yeah. 00:24:09 Darren: Yeah. Ten foot six weight. I love Sage’s bar I’m in love with echo. Stillwater rock. 00:24:14 Phil: That’s a good rod. That’s a good. 00:24:16 Darren: Is really a nice rod. 00:24:17 Phil: There’s a, you know, more and more these days, more of those ten. I think we can perhaps attribute that to Euro Nymphing. And another, you know, that had the longer rods because for years we were struggling on lakes with an old nine footers. And they just, you know, they don’t I just personally like you don’t feel they perform as well on a lake as the longer rods. 00:24:35 Darren: Well, I remember how important they were when we were fishing out of tubes as kids all the time. Yeah. You know, if you look at all the old books that are around about Henry’s Lake, you’ll see a lot of the authors gripe about the the float tube kids, you know, the rubber hats they used to. 00:24:50 Phil: Cheerios bowl. 00:24:52 Darren: Yeah. I remember when Paige came out with her RPO three and they had a nine foot six and it was the ideal tool. Yeah. And of course, now that we can get ten foot and ten sixes, it’s even better when you’re sitting in the water. But I’m lucky enough to get a do it out of a boat Yeah. 00:25:11 Phil: Um, what about fly lines? What fly lines should somebody be bringing to Henry’s? 00:25:15 Darren: You’ve basically gotta have three fly lines there for ideal. But you can get away with three. You want your floater for your indicator work? Mhm. If you’ve got a calm day and you can use a super long leader, you can still use that floater and retrieve if you’re going to retrieve, I want to at least the hover. I want my line underneath the water surface. Uh, we’re almost always going to have a breeze in the mornings at Henry’s. And if you’ve got your, your floater out there and you’re having to work that line slow, that wind is going to create a belly in that folder. And it’s just, it can get really frustrating because you’re going to feel fish, but as they’re saying goodbye. Yeah. So if you can get a hover and get it underneath the surface. Yeah, I love that. If I only had one line to fish, it would be an intermediate, whether it’s the clear or the electric one, you know, that one and a half to two inches. 00:26:08 Phil: Per second. 00:26:08 Darren: Per second. But I don’t want this one line, so. Yeah, yeah. The hover, the intermediate and then yeah, you could use the type three. A lot of times early in the season, uh, when the water gets warmer, those fish can move out into the little deeper water. And if you’re using an intermediate, you’re fishing ten to twelve feet. You can still do it, but you’re having to count down sixty 70s on every cast. Yeah. If you’re fishing all day long, that can be a lot of casts that you’re not getting a bug in front of. Yeah. 00:26:38 Phil: To me it’s definitely a line lake rather for those slower sinking lines because it’s just, you know, you know, when it’s averaging, was it averaging twelve feet? There’s a lot of skinny water there. 00:26:48 Darren: Right? Most of the fish that we like you, like you mentioned earlier when we caught those fish in the shallows. That’s the fun thing about Henry’s is the seasons. But we can catch fish anywhere from a foot and a half deep to four feet for a month and not have to go any deeper than that. And so if you don’t have a covered line, you don’t have one of the tools that is prime line for that. 00:27:11 Phil: Yeah. And if people don’t know what a cover line is, it’s a slow sinking line. You can get sinks at about one inch per second depending on the manufacturer. And, uh, just, I’ll put in the show notes, but I did a whole, uh, two episode set on understanding and making sense of Stillwater fly lines. I think, Darren, you can agree most times people transferring from a moving water fishing to lakes and just overwhelmed by the volume of line choices and trying to make heads or tails out of it. It gets to be a little intimidating. And unfortunately, I think it maybe pushes some people away thinking they need all these lines. When, you know, each lake’s a little different and you and I both like lines, but that doesn’t mean you need all of them all the time. So. 00:27:50 Darren: Right. And it’s not only intimidating, but when, you know, when people come up to me at a seminar and say, how many lines do you have in your real life or real bag there? Yeah, I start counting them and it’s like fifteen, sixteen, seven and they’re going, wait a minute, at one hundred bucks a piece plus a spool. I can’t afford that. 00:28:08 Phil: Yeah, well, you don’t have to go buy them all on Tuesday. 00:28:10 Darren: Yeah, exactly. 00:28:11 Phil: You gather them over time? 00:28:12 Darren: Yeah. Over time. Some of my favorite lines are still lines that I bought back in the eighties. 00:28:19 Phil: Yeah. There’s still that, isn’t there? That, um, you know, it’s like and fly rods are the same and other things where that manufacturer made that one particular product for a short period of time. It was fantastic. We all fell in love with it and then it got discontinued for whatever reason. And everybody’s just, if you can find that, you grab it, right? So yeah. 00:28:39 Darren: I’m always watching eBay for it. Yeah. An old see, when Scientific Angler first introduced their quote unquote uniform sync. Yeah, it wasn’t the parabolic like it is now. It would sync in a level. Otherwise the tip wasn’t sinking slower or faster than the belly. It all sync at once. And the old quote unquote uniform sync. Type three was my favorite line in the world. 00:29:07 Phil: Yeah, they used to make it called the high speed high D. Everybody wanted that one too, which was about a type back then was I think was a type three sync rate. So when you look nowadays, when we got sixes and sevens, it wasn’t so high speed ID. 00:29:19 Darren: No, not at. 00:29:20 Phil: All. Uh, what about leaders? Um, everybody likes leader setups and formulas and we can spend hours on debating the the pros and cons of every leader system on your, let’s say, on your, um, your talk about your floating line. How do you set up, how do you like to set up your indicator leaders? 00:29:37 Darren: My indicator leader is pretty easy. In fact, both my indicator leader or my indicator setup and my hover setup. I use a nylon twenty pound, but that’s probably thirty inches long. The reason I want that is because nylon or monofilament is going to float, where if I’m using the floral, it sinks faster now when I go intermediate three, anything heavier than that, then I’m using everything. Is the fluorocarbon. 00:30:06 Phil: Okay? 00:30:07 Darren: Because it’s going to sink. I don’t want anything to keep my line from not sinking. On the other hand, with my floater, I think you and I are probably spitting images of each other as far as that goes. I go probably two feet, twenty inches of twenty pounds, and I run that with a nail knot. I don’t use one of your rings or your new lines, and I’ve seen those. That’s okay. However, I’m old school. From there I go down and, uh, blood knot down to wherever I want my swivel. And from that not to wear my swivel is will always be the same pound test. Otherwise I’m running, you know, red label or whatever. I’m running ten pound from there all the way down to my swivel. Yeah. And that depends on what my depth of my water is. And then from there, I swivel. If I’m running two flies, I’ll run a tag off of that swivel. Otherwise I’ll run probably two to three feet down to my fly from that swivel. And I, I pretty much leave that alone except for changing flies. Everything that I change as far as water depth goes from the swivel to my blood knot, and I’ll have a couple of blood knots in there just because it’s, it’s easier for me to say, hey, that’s where my swivel or my indicator goes is two inches below the third knot. Yeah. And it’s easier for old guys to keep track. 00:31:34 Phil: And of course, by the end of the day, your leader doesn’t look as nice as it did when it started. It’s all been chopped and changed. It’s longer, it’s shorter. It’s all put together because you want to keep fishing. And if I’m. 00:31:44 Darren: Retrieving Phil, the only difference between that on my hover and my intermediate lines, I’ll step that down a little bit. Down to ten pound test. And I’m almost always running either In or eight pound. Yeah. 00:31:57 Phil: You don’t want to go late. 00:31:59 Darren: But I run it long. Yeah. Most of the guys on the Stillwater I think will run seven to ten feet. And you know they think anything over nine feet is long. Yeah. I’m a believer of twelve to fifteen to eighteen feet on my lidar. Especially if I’m eating more than one bug. Normally when I’m fishing still waters, I use one bug. 00:32:19 Phil: Well, where Henry’s is, sometimes that second floor gets to be a a pain in the butt because it’s hanging up on everything. And if you hook a fish, it’s going, you know, it’s it’s one of the times you need to think about it. I think single flies is when you’re fishing in those kind of rich, weedy conditions. You know, one fly is challenging enough sometimes to keep it weed free to have two on there. Plus, I think it accelerates the sink rate of everything at times as well. So yeah, that’s what makes it unique. Yeah. 00:32:45 Darren: If you’re using that countdown method. Yeah. Having an extra fly on there just. Yeah. Kind of screws up my count. So if you were to go out on any given day, You know, let’s just say you. We’ll go over to Turkey Creek, one of the marquee places on the lake. You could probably sit there and count twenty boats within, you know, seventy five yards of each other. 00:33:06 Phil: Mhm. 00:33:07 Darren: The guys that have been out there doing it the longest, the guys that catch the most fish, the guys that make everybody else scratch their head. Almost all of them are using one bug, and it’s because of that extra undergrowth. Usually if you’ve got two, that’s just something else that you’ve got to clean off. Mhm. So anyway, that’s what we see. 00:33:26 Phil: When you are using two flies. You mentioned when you’re fishing vertically on an indicator, you’re about two to three feet apart. How about when you’re fishing, you know, cast and retrieve with your hover or intermediates. How far do you like to keep the flies apart? If you’re using two flies. 00:33:38 Darren: At least three feet. Now, I know this is about Henry’s, but I love pyramid too. And I always fish two bugs down there. Yeah, but they’re six feet apart from each other. So. Yeah, Henry’s six feet apart. That’s I’m not going to say it’s not feasible. It’s doable. But yeah, it just doesn’t give you the control that I like over that. One single bug and where it’s at, what it’s doing, the retrieve, you’re doing different things like that. 00:34:04 Phil: Any other things? Uh, Rod’s lines and leaders. People need to know for Henry’s brother. 00:34:10 Darren: No, but like you teach and like, I like to teach my seminars. You know, the depth pattern. Retrieve. Now you turn yours around. Retrieve pattern. Yeah, because I like Henry’s. I switched those last two. And it’s not that they’re not equally important. The first one is if you can have any bug on it. And if you’re not down where those fish are or at the level that those fish are hanging out, you’re just going to watch everybody else. 00:34:37 Phil: Best fly in the world. If it’s not where the fish are, it doesn’t really matter. 00:34:40 Darren: Exactly. 00:34:41 Phil: Yeah. 00:34:42 Darren: When it comes to the retrieving the pattern, the reason I switched it is because you’ll hear people talk about how selective fish are on the Madison or on the Henry’s fork, or on the South fork of the snake or any of these renowned trout streams. I will put Henry’s leg up as being selective against any moving water fish there is. There are days when you will pull your hair out. I love to throw, pump fish and try to try to match them. Exactly. And it’s still it’s it’s a huge puzzle some days. 00:35:15 Phil: Well, yeah, because some days you do that throw and they’re full of those little scuds and it’s exactly. 00:35:20 Darren: Thankfully then that retrieve is really important too, because like we saw last fall, you know, we’re doing our normal eight inch, what we call an eight inch Henry strip, which is just a normal cadence, eight inch strip. They didn’t want that. They wanted everything fast. And it took us a minute to discover that. But boy, once we did, it got pretty fun. 00:35:40 Phil: Yeah, usually you figure that out when you’re reeling in to go somewhere else and you get plowed and go, wait a minute. 00:35:45 Darren: Then when we moved to the shallows, it was just the opposite. Yeah, they wanted it really, really slow. 00:35:51 Phil: Yeah, it would just lock up. Yeah, that’s a good point. Just to keep everything. Um, very so you were mentioning retrieves, uh, the eight inch strip. What else have you got that you like? 00:36:00 Darren: One of my favorite strips, especially early morning and Henry’s is get your bug down close to the bottom and just rip it in as fast as you can. And I mean, I’m not not doing the, the roly poly, but either. A little baitfish imitation. One of my favorite bugs is called a Halloween leech. And it’s not really a leech. It’s more of a woolly bugger, but it’s got that orange brown variegated chenille with a brown tail on it, a marabou. And for some reason, those fish when you rip it fast, I don’t know what they think it is, whether it’s a little baitfish or what, but they can really get on it. 00:36:38 Phil: Yeah. Or maybe they just see it moving and it moves to them. Food moves. So go get it right? 00:36:44 Darren: Absolutely. 00:36:45 Phil: No, it’s a good thing fish don’t have flashcards down there, right? Oh, wait a minute. That’s not that. You know. 00:36:50 Darren: Those mornings that you catch them on the fast retrieve it. I don’t want to say it’s cheating, but it is almost cheating because all you gotta do is strip it. And if they hit it, you don’t have to strip set or nothing. They’ve they themselves. 00:37:05 Speaker 3: Not many companies are building their own gear these days, but intrepid camp gear is changing that. 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Just for people’s. Just so they know what it is. It’s basically a woolly bugger. Yeah. And then we just use a little brighter some of the crystal Chanels or the crystal dubbing as a body. And then some guys will like a little bit of crystal flash or mylar in the tail. I all of my woolly buggers were my, my crystal buggers. I’ve got just a plain marabou tail and they’re fairly sparse. 00:38:32 Phil: They’re very sparse. Yeah. And you also liked I noticed a really short hackle on them. Um, almost undersized. So if you’re. What are you using. Were you using a size twelve? Were. 00:38:45 Darren: We were. We were throwing. Actually, it was a size ten. 00:38:47 Phil: It was a ten. Yeah, I knew it was small. 00:38:49 Darren: Size ten, but. See, my hackle on that is actually for a size sixteen. 00:38:53 Phil: Yeah. Very small. 00:38:54 Darren: Yeah, yeah. Very small. So yeah, they are. In fact, if you go back to some of the old books and the Bible for Henry’s Lake was written by a gentleman named Bill chess. Yeah. And it’s fly fishing, Henry’s Lake. And I mean, it’s been around since the mid nineties. I think it came out in ninety six or ninety seven, somewhere in there. Right. In the heyday, right when I was one of those tubers that everybody got. But he’s the one that has really probably the father of, of some of these fly patterns. And a lot of us have developed little offspring of them and just build them a little better. I can remember some of the old fly patterns. They’d say they you Palmer your hackle and then trim it close. Well, I hate trimming hackle period. And so I always like to use the smaller, you know. Otherwise, if I’m using a ten. I’ll go down at least three sizes. Yeah, I’ll go down to a sixteen. If I’m using twelve or fourteen, fourteen is one of my favorite blogs up there is a limitation and it’s called A Mighty Mouse. Yeah. They call for a big old thick body on that and a big Palmer tackle on it. Uh, mine is almost completely opposite. It doesn’t look anything like it. We still call it a mighty, but it’s as thin as you can use it. It used peacock girl. Uh, the original recipe calls for three strands. I used one strand, one wrap of hackle on. As far as that goes, just I peel the hackle and then wrap it forward with just one piece of hackle. 00:40:22 Phil: Okay, so you’re stripping the the, uh, one, stripping off one side of it. So you’re only wrapping. Yeah. Okay. Just to keep it sparse. Yep, yep. 00:40:31 Darren: And so the thing that I learned up there, and I learned this from my brother, my brother is one of the quote unquote old timers. and he’s also an artist. That’s how he made his living was illustrating artists. He taught at one of the colleges down here in Idaho. His fame was probably, uh, Prince of Egypt, uh, spirit. An animated horse show. 00:40:55 Phil: Okay. 00:40:56 Darren: Um, and then he did a lot of the Harry Potter promotional stuff. 00:41:00 Phil: Oh, really? 00:41:00 Darren: Cool. He worked at Dreamworks, but his art went right into his writing. And because he was a teacher, he got to spend every summer up there for a bunch of years. And he just it was a labor of love. But you’d be proud of him. He loved that throat bump. And he’d pump those bugs out and then make his bugs look like them. And so a lot of the bugs that I use, a lot of the bugs that I teach people to tie, are imitations of what my brother made. It pretty much has come up with. 00:41:32 Phil: Okay. And you mentioned that book by Bill. Um, it’s still available. Um, It links to it in the show notes. I know, um, our mutual friend Mike at, uh, Drift Lodge and Fly shop carries that there. They’re probably like, oh yeah, one of the great shops there that actually caters to Stillwater fishing and Henry’s Lake in particular. So, um, he’s got a great, um, operation there with a fly shop and accommodation options as well. So yeah, and, uh, that book is I got it. It’s as you said, it’s the Bible, little blue book. It’s not very thick. It’s not, it’s not going to take you three months to read, but it’s got all the spots, um, marked in there, all, you know, any, all the reference points. I think he breaks it down seasonally. He’s got fly plates in there. So if you want to tie some of these patterns that Darren is mentioning, um, and others, um, you can see the originals, um right there, I think Bill, is he still tying commercially? No, he is okay. 00:42:27 Darren: His business and uh, he lived down in Idaho Falls now and he’s retired and. 00:42:32 Phil: I know he was still a couple of years ago as a bike shop and he was dropping off some flies. He was still tying. So he must have just recently stopped tying because Mike had still some original bill sheets patterns that he would he would tie, he would bring him in a little box and drop him off. I met I had the good pleasure of meeting Bill and talking with him. Very modest man, um you know, and he said he actually took a little bit of heat when that book came out. I guess some of the old timers didn’t like him, uh, giving away the secrets. But, uh, as you’ve taught me, when I went to Henry’s, all the secrets in the world still didn’t help some days. 00:43:04 Darren: Absolutely. I remember one day at Stanley Springs. Bill gave me a tip on keeping my rod tip just an inch or two above the water out of my float tube, so when I retrieve my pause, that line was just a little bit. 00:43:22 Phil: Yeah. 00:43:22 Darren: And he says, if that line all of a sudden doesn’t group or you see it straightened, that’s probably a fish. And that was one of the most memorable lessons I’ve ever had. And it taught me how to catch a lot more fish than I was at the time. 00:43:36 Phil: Yeah, that’s a really good tip. Um, watching for those line takes. The line when you strip it, uh, rises up and when you pause, it droops down. And then if you’re pulls up again or starts to pull up and you’re not doing any retrieve, then something else is pulling on it in the form of a fish on the other end. So that’s a great tip. Um, what else we got here? Any other flies you like? 00:43:57 Darren: Boy, I’ll tell you what. That little root beer crystal that I told you about, you can tie that in innumerable colors. Uh, that one is root beer. It’s kind of a lighter brown. 00:44:08 Phil: Yeah, it’s almost a. 00:44:10 Darren: Black and olive. 00:44:11 Phil: Yeah. Root beer, root beer color. It makes sense. It’s not a deep dark brown. Um, you mentioned olive as well, and I think you said black. Of course. 00:44:19 Darren: Yeah. And one of my favorites in that pattern is not quite chartreuse, but really close. It’s a real light olive. Yeah. And when the damsels start moving early in June, sometimes that bug can be a good ticket. But the thing about Henry’s is it’s like any other Stillwater. You can get out there one day and have a good day on a pattern the next day. They don’t want anything to do with that pattern. And so every day, that puzzle that you’ve got to start working out. Now, sometimes the pattern’s easy. Uh, sometimes it takes us a little while like I did us last fall. 00:44:52 Phil: Yeah, yeah. It did. And then we kind of ran over him by accident and went, that’s a, that’s about the fifth hybrid I’ve seen. Scoot away, I said. You and I are like, I think we should stop here and just see what’s the convention going on here. We’re missing. So other flies you mentioned the, the, uh, the mighty mite, the, uh, the crystal buggers. Um. 00:45:12 Darren: Yeah, if you’re going to come to Henry’s, you’ve gotta have a bunch of contacts. Uh, anything from your basic ice cream cones to your silver’s a lot of darker beads, lighter bodies. But again, it’s. You’ll go through a half a dozen before you find out which one they’re going to eat. And the fun thing about Henry’s is, generally speaking, if you put the right bug on, they let you know pretty quick. And if you find the right patterns, you can be in a group of boats and you know, there’s only one or two boats that’s catching fish. And you can have the same exact pattern, but it’s just the way it ties it and be a little more sparse than the other guy. 00:45:54 Phil: Okay. Um, let’s you’ve been mentioning chironomids, damsels, leeches and stuff. Is there a if you were to draw a hatch chart for Henry’s, what would it look like? What bugs come off in what order? And Ronnie’s first. Yeah. 00:46:07 Darren: Yeah, that of course when it first comes out, you pretty much big stuff, you know, your liters, your crystals, uh, any of your bait fish imitations like that. Those fish want to eat first, you know, have free water again, then our colonies come off, then the damsels, then we have a really good caddis hatch. And yeah, that keeps us going for a good month. And those fish. Remember that all the way into the fall, they’ll you’ll catch them on imitation. But we also have calabashes in there too. And sometimes those fish, especially in the shallow waters, Howard Creek, uh, over Duck Creek Creek, some of those, those fish can just get boiling. 00:46:50 Phil: So they’re eating the nymphs and the adults. 00:46:52 Darren: And once in a while, in fact, last year we were having a fairly good morning there at the state park, which is Howard Crickets. I mean, it’s, it’s kind of weird. You launch your boat and you’re at one hundred yards from the shore and you’ve got State Park, all the campers and everything. It’s like you’re, I don’t know, like you’re fishing in Central Park in LA. The caliber starts to come off about ten o’clock, and every once in a while you’d hear a fish hit an adult because you could hear him gulp, you know, or you’d see a bubble and you could tell that that’s what they were doing. And there’s one guy that came out here, and he was bound and determined that he was going to catch him on dries, and about every fifteen minutes or so he’d. Hey, got another one on Ladams. So yeah, you can catch him there on dries. But yeah, vast majority are underneath the surface. 00:47:38 Phil: And same with the caddis, mostly on the pupa patterns and. 00:47:41 Darren: Yes. Absolutely. 00:47:42 Phil: Yeah. How big are the caddis? What size are we talking? 00:47:45 Darren: Uh, generally we’re tying them. Sometimes we’ll tie them in a three x long size eight. We get a lot of those those night or those, you know. 00:47:54 Phil: Travelers or motorboat big ones. Yeah. 00:47:56 Darren: Yep. And and they get big. Most of the patterns that I tie are in size ten standard length ten or twelve. 00:48:04 Phil: Okay. 00:48:05 Darren: So yeah, my favorite hook up there is the Hanoch. Nine twenty five. 00:48:10 Phil: Yeah. 00:48:10 Darren: Which is a, a, a stout hook. I’ve never had one fail. Henry’s on a fish. So yeah, that’s what I tie most of my bugs on up there. As for Hanoch nine twenty five. Uh, like I said, no standard length. So a lot of the guys I’m on two or three x long, but they’ll go twelve, two x long, something like that. 00:48:29 Phil: What’s your favorite caddis pupa pattern. What’s it look like? 00:48:32 Darren: I would probably call it Henry’s Lake Renegade. 00:48:34 Phil: Oh okay. 00:48:35 Darren: You know the old renegade which has got the brown hackle on the back. It’s got a peacock girl. 00:48:41 Phil: Body. 00:48:42 Darren: A mid body, and then a white on the front. White hackle on the front. Well, the Henry’s Lake Renegade has got. And you can tie it with a little red tag, a little thread tag just below that rear hackle. And then you just one twist of your hackle. And again, I downsized those hackles on that bug. And then I also used a little wire rib kind of work holding my peacock girl body down. Otherwise if you do it just a peacock girl, or even if you thread it up, they just don’t last very long. Special trash those bugs pretty quick. And so with the if I count a wrap a little piece of These small or extra small wire, usually in a gold or red. Those are my two favorite colors and in a real small one, wrap a hackle on the front. Very sparse. When the cat is moving, that could be if I only had one fish, one flight of Henry’s. That probably what it would be. 00:49:40 Phil: Yeah. What about your damsels? You mentioned damsels. Got any favorite damsel patterns you like? 00:49:44 Darren: Yeah, we’ve got one. And the cool thing about damsels. Most of your damsel patterns will work if you tie them real, real skinny, real sparse. The cool thing about those damsels. And I’ve watched them crawl out on my boat and morph. The color of those nymphs is Kelly Green, G.I. Joe Green. Yeah. And so a lot of my damsel damsel nymphs are bordering chartreuse because I want it just bright. Because that’s the thing that I noticed. Is there just a bright Kelly green when they’re, you know, when they climb out. And so a lot of times those those fish are key, I think, on the color of that bug. 00:50:23 Phil: Yeah. That’s probably why that little sparse bugger of yours works so well. 00:50:27 Darren: Yeah, I’m sure. 00:50:28 Phil: It. 00:50:28 Darren: Does. Yeah, I’m sure it does. Especially if you’re shipping it quick. Yeah. 00:50:31 Phil: All right. Let’s talk about the scourge of many still waters that people hate to fish but work so well are Scuds. Um, because there’s just so many of those things. It’s a bit of a needle in a haystack. Yeah. But they, I have any fish I’ve ever thrown, sampled. They’re, they’re always in, they’re not the biggest Scuds in the world. It’s probably like Argentina. The poor things don’t get to get that big before somebody’s chowing down on them. 00:50:54 Darren: Yeah. And that’s what makes them tough to fish. A lot of guys I’ve seen guys use a little bit of, uh, scud pattern that they’ll hang under an indicator and do extremely well. And that’s, that’s one of my goals this next season is to become better that way with some of those patterns. As far as stripping a Scud, as small as they are, it’s almost tough if you’re fishing two bugs. A lot of times you can put that as your dropper. Yeah. But yeah, just use that as your single fly. It’s there’s times that I’ve had good days on that. But generally I’ll eat something a little bigger. 00:51:30 Phil: Yeah, I think we look at a lot of times, at least the way I grew up, if they had those little Scuds, a little tiny hyalella or mature gamma shrimp in them, it told you the fish were eating and you could usually get them to eat a leech or something a little bigger. Um, you know, typically we ran into that kind of situation in the fall months and that’s when we were there. They start switching over to those staple bread and butter food sources to fatten up for. 00:51:52 Darren: Well, and they eat a lot of them. Yeah. You know, if, if a guy ever has to kill a fish and, you know, he cleans it, I. I killed one fish last year. Out of all the fish I caught up there. And the meat, it looks like salmon that come from Alaska. Is that right? 00:52:08 Phil: Yeah. Rich and Scuds. 00:52:09 Darren: That’s part of our score, is people like to eat them. I want to believe my pet in the water. 00:52:15 Phil: Yeah. Um, what other any other insects in there? You got some snails? I know sometimes people try and imitate. 00:52:23 Darren: Yeah, they do every once in a while. Dragonfly nymphs. Uh, you know, a lot of times I think that when we’re using a bushier bugger. I think that that’s what they think those are. Especially if you run them in little bursts as you retrieve. Yeah, we’ve got quite a few of those. Um, I think later in the year. The big thing that people overlook is bait fish imitations and, and small skinny bait fish imitations. You know, they, they see the gear guys coming back and they’ll catch a fish or two on a Rapala that they’re breaking and they figure, hey, I gotta throw, you know, something that I got over at the slide in. Yeah. And I’m not saying that Kelly’s bugs don’t work. 00:52:59 Phil: No, they work great. 00:53:00 Darren: No they do. Yeah. I’ve got a whole box of. 00:53:03 Phil: Kelly’s, but. 00:53:04 Darren: But sometimes I think on the Stillwater smaller is better. 00:53:07 Phil: Yeah. We have that in ours. We’ve got two species of minnows getting our legs, fathead minnows and brook stickleback, and they’re both very small and, you know, a small little. You know, an eights big right and slender little zonkers or, you know, little. I think sometimes half of the times those little micro leeches and small leeches, we fish, they’re taking them, you know, they got the coloration of those bait fish as well. So they’re taking them for that. Yeah. 00:53:31 Darren: Especially if you’re using one that maybe balance that you’re using as a retrieve. So you get that extra motion. Oh yeah, that works good. 00:53:38 Phil: So have you got those lots of space, lots of spaces, lots of places around. Henry’s have you got some favorites? You’ve been mentioned some like Taji and Howard. Um, there’s a number of creeks that come into Henry’s that feed it. Right. So if we start off in the, let’s say the northeast corner up by, uh, the, the interchange there that takes you back out of Idaho towards Montana Highway two, right? Yeah. I’ve driven it so many times. I’m just kind of in a, in a trance, just sort of driving and not really paying attention. I know I’m going in the right direction. 00:54:08 Darren: Yeah. The north shore where the hatchery is, where wild Rose is. There’s a lot of good water along there. Uh, especially early in the year. Early in the year before our weed growth comes up, our spring season. The fish are scattered everywhere. And so you’re, you’re basically just searching for fish. Once you find a pocket of fish, that’s the fun thing is sometimes you can sit there and pick off several. You know that if it slows down, then you got to move around and find them a little bit more as you work around the lake. Counterclockwise from the north shore. Then you come over to the Timber Creek Pintail Point area, which is got a lot of springs before they put the dam in. That’s where the old timber creek came into the reservoir or into the lake. And so the old, the old stream channel that goes through there has a lot of old willow clumps, old downed trees that are still in there and different things like that. So if you go in there sometimes you can have good days, but you’re going to lose some bugs on, you know, submerged stuff as you move around from point. Probably the most popular place on the lake is Staley Springs. Uh, in the old days it was called The Springs. But yes, Haley’s is used to be the best place on the lake. Back when I learned how to fish the lake in the nineties in the tubes, that’s where July, August, that’s where ninety percent of your fishermen were. Was around Staley Springs. Uh, unfortunately, we’ve loved that part of the lake to death. We’ve got huge, big old million dollar homes that ring all the way around. Staley’s above. Staley’s up, down. 00:55:45 Phil: Yeah, there’s some beautiful houses there. 00:55:47 Darren: Pretty much. 00:55:47 Phil: Yeah. 00:55:48 Darren: Killed our spring. 00:55:49 Phil: Yeah. 00:55:49 Darren: We have no flow and we have no spring flow. Uh, all of the weeds have gone back in. Last year is the first year that we could only find one little circle that was weed free and what used to be the best place in the lake. So if you pick up that book from, you know, from Mike up there at They the lodge, or if you order one online. A lot of the things that Bill talks about in that lake of change, just because our water conditions have changed. You know, Duck Creek used to flow really nice. Targhee Creek used to flow really nice. Now they’ve got pivots, you know, and those pull out of the aquifer. And so those cricks come down. Now thankfully we’ve got a group up there called the Henrys Lake Foundation. I Damon used to be the director, now it’s Kevin Schneider. And those guys do so much good work on the tributaries putting whether it’s bridges or irrigation diversions, to keep the fray going out into the fields or into the pasture. It keeps the fish in the creek. And the way they’re doing it, they’re trying to keep more water in the creek. You know, they’re keeping the cattle out of the creek, which is good. And so, yeah, the Henry’s Foundation. Henry’s Lake Foundation, along with those landowners around the lake, they’ve done a lot of really good things to help the lake. and we’re on an upturn this year. We’re going to get more fish. Bigger fish. 00:57:09 Phil: Okay, so we’re moving now down the east. Sorry, the west shore down by the west shore. 00:57:14 Darren: You got a state? 00:57:15 Phil: Yeah. 00:57:15 Darren: Then you come to the county dock, which is from Park. Yeah. Great place to camp. It’s just a dry camp, but it’s got a boat dock, so you can launch your boat there. Out from straight out from there, east from there is some good water. Usually you’re eight to twelve feet right in there. Then around the corner, especially in June, you get into the area that’s called Gamesville Haven. And yeah, shallow water. So sometimes if the pelicans are in there heavy or the cormorants are in there heavy, the fish may not be in there. Very good numbers. You’re going to have to go out a little bit deeper water. But that’s what makes that fun in the fall is because that area in the fall, those fish will move back in there because all of the predation is left. And that’s one of the places that we did well last year. One day, then from that area down to heaven, then next is Duck Creek. And that’s, I guess overall, that’s probably my favorite area on the lake. It varies anywhere from a foot and a half in close to where Duck Creek comes into the lake to where you can go out and find holes in the weeds out in twelve feet of water. Uh, that’s where we were fishing that morning that you caught your big fish last fall was just out Duck Creek in six feet of water. And you just have to putt around and find holes in the weeds. And as soon as you find the holes in the weeds, that’s, uh, chuck-a-rama for the fish. 00:58:32 Phil: Yeah. 00:58:33 Darren: From there, you get over into Hope Creek, which is in the southwest corner. You’ve got the cliff. Creek is tough because it’s really weedy really fast. Uh, it could be good in the fall, but most of those fish are even living or living in the weeds. Where else? The predation is pretty heavy on them until they move out of there during the normal month of the season, fall and spring, they can be in there pretty good. Then you’ve got the cliffs on the south side, which can be really good. There’s a bunch of springs that come into the lake over along there. It could be good either retrieving or a lot of guys. That’s one of the the indicator hang out over there, uh, goose Bay, which is getting back over towards the state park. Good place for cutthroats. It gets really weed choked as the season goes on. And so a lot of people don’t pay a lot of attention to it. It can be fun if you sneak in there in an evening when it’s a little bit windy out on the main lake, because it’s sheltered from the wind that way. Then you get into Howard Creek, Howard Creek, and Turkey Creek on the east side, and Howard Creek is on the northeast corner. Those are probably or the northwest corner. Those are probably the marquee places of the lake. Uh, hatch. Good hatch. You’ll get damsels in there. All kinds of stuff. Lots of crannies early in the season of Star Trek. Uh, that’s the cab hang out over in Star Trek. 01:00:05 Phil: Now, in the fall months, um, one of the first times I fished. Henry’s brought my big boat down, launched it at the state launch, and everybody was fishing right off the beach. Um, yeah, because that’s where they plant a lot of the cutthroat in there and they kind of come back. Is that right? Is am I understanding? 01:00:20 Darren: Yeah. They do. If you’re there early in the year. Yeah. The kind of places that we found on are the boat docks. Just because a lot of people stack up right around there, because when Fish and Game launches all those fish. Yeah. That’s where those fish are going to come back and they crowd up there. And so, you know, it’s tough to launch a boat when everybody’s stacked up around the launches. 01:00:43 Phil: Yeah. And I launched and I basically, you know, launched and I went out and sat and fished back towards the launch, almost into the to the east of it. And I sat there for about half an hour. I think I caught a couple fish and I went, I did not come all the way down here just to launch a boat and go twenty five feet and sit there. I’m going to go exploring and see what. You know, because it was a nice day and you could run around with, you know. Relative peace of mind, because I think we should mention it’s important. On Henry’s to really pay attention to the weather because as you and I. You told me that that lake can go from glass to North Atlantic four to. Six foot swells. And people, you know, unfortunately, have passed away on. That lake almost every year of getting themselves into. You know. In situations that um are very avoidable if you pay attention to the conditions. 01:01:29 Darren: Yeah. Just as, oh, we lost a couple of veteran fishermen got out there and. Of course, nobody knows exactly what happened, but they found their boat. Running and then found them a day and a half later. Yeah. 01:01:40 Phil: Sad story. Yeah. It’s sad. 01:01:42 Darren: So just gotta be careful. Yeah. And the tough thing about it is a lot of times you don’t know what direction that’s going to come. You can get a breeze that’s coming from one direction. And you can have a thunderstorm that’s coming in off of Reynolds Pass, which is off of Montana, and all of a sudden that wind switches. And if you’re on the other side from where you launched, yeah, you better have a boat that can get back to it. 01:02:02 Phil: Yeah. Well, we see, you know, there’s people with, you know, you’ve got a pretty substantial boat that’ll get you around. And then you see some people in little float tubes and boats and things like that. And you can certainly fish Henry’s that way, but you just got to be careful. You know, maybe stay close to home. So if you’re going to launch at the at from the county dock, just stay close there. Don’t be deciding to go for a paddle to the state launch because yeah. 01:02:25 Darren: Don’t let the weather scare anybody off. But you just got to be careful of it. I mean, the fun thing about Henry’s is I would say probably eighty percent of your mornings are fishable the mornings that aren’t fishable, you’re either going to have a wind coming off of Reynolds, which is a northwest wind, and it can shut that lake down when it blows from that direction. Sometimes you can get an east wind that’ll be bad in the mornings, but most of the time you’re going to be able to fish the mornings. 01:02:51 Phil: Yeah. Now from let’s talk about that because um. Henry’s is an early lake, isn’t it? You get out there. You had us out there at first light. And, uh, tell me about your. If Darren’s going fishing just by himself or with a friend like myself who’ll do whatever Darren says. Um, what time are we starting? Where are we going? Uh, let’s. 01:03:11 Darren: Yeah, as I tell my buddies or or some of the guys that come to fish with me, uh, the boat leaves the dock at five, and if you’re there at five oh two, uh, I’ll see you at lunch. Uh, you know, I’m not going to say that that first hour before the sun comes up is the best. But if you’re not out there, you can miss some phenomenal fishing. I’ve had some mornings where. Yeah, it’s just you don’t tell people how many fish you cook because they don’t believe you. It’s not like that all the time. Sometimes you can catch one or two in the morning before the bugs start moving. Generally speaking, if you’re on the water around nine, ten o’clock. Yeah, ten to two, I love that? 01:03:52 Phil: That’s most of the experiences we got in a lot of the other lakes. I fished in North America. It’s one of the appeals about it is it’s a ten to two, you know, ten to three, ten to four kind of fishery. But you know, those are those special places. Pyramid is one. Henry’s is another where getting on their first light is often a very good strategy. And the other thing too is it’s just nestled in such a beautiful place. And you watch the world wake up. Yeah. And just look at the, you know, all the scenery everywhere you look. And especially in the fall when I was there with you last, you know, the colors in the in the trees along the shorelines and up in the passes, you’ve got elk bugling. It’s just. Yep. Yeah. It’s nothing prettier. 01:04:31 Darren: Than the centennials in September. That’s one thing we haven’t talked about is, is how pretty it is. There’s a lot of times that I’ll get frustrated with, you know, not having the right plug or a line that kinks up on me or knocks up on me, and I have to sit down and just look where I’m fishing. I mean, it’s like you’re fishing inside a pitcher. 01:04:51 Phil: I know I’ve caught myself gazing there sometimes. And you know. You alright? Yeah. I’m fine. Sorry. Just zoned out for a minute and just absorbing everything. Mother nature’s got to show me there. So we’ve talked about, uh, a little bit of the history of the lake. Um, we’ve talked about, uh, the rods and lines a little bit into your lidar setup. Some of your favorite bugs retrieves where to go. We walked through the hatch cycle, um, sort of when to fish it. Anything else we’ve missed? Darren, is there anything else you want to get out there and talk about? 01:05:25 Darren: Not really. I think the fun thing about Henry’s is even the last slow years that we’ve had, you know, we’re building up good. We’re starting to catch some bigger fish. Every cast you make out there, you’ve got a chance at a double digit hybrid. You’ve got a chance at a six plus pound brookie that are still in there. Four and five pound cutthroat. Which are Yellowstone cutthroat. You just don’t see that everywhere else. Um, that’s what makes Henry’s really special is the chance of catching those big fish like that. Yeah, that’s why we fish stillwaters. Yeah, the fish are big. Yeah. Don’t measure our fish in inches. We do it by pounds, so. 01:06:06 Phil: Better watch. 01:06:06 Darren: It. But anyway, that’s what I love about Henry’s. 01:06:09 Phil: Yeah. And it’s again, it’s easily accessible. You know, great roadways. You’re not going ten miles in off a four by four road and beating your vehicle to death. It’s all paved to get there. Lots of accommodation options. You’ve got the state campground. You mentioned. You’ve got the county site that you mentioned. You’ve got Mike’s place, Drift Lodge and fly shop with cabins nearby. You’ve got other accommodations. The. Yeah, the wild rose on the north side. I’ve stayed there. You’ve got West Yellowstone, you could go stay in there if you want. And of course you’ve got a lot of other things to see and fish around there. You’ve got the Henry’s Fork, the Madison, the south fork of the snake. You guys are just loaded with you. Just all of you could just get spun around in a circle. And then when you stop and slowly get your bearings back and just walk straight, you’ll run into something. Um, yeah, it’s it’s. 01:06:55 Darren: Yeah, it’s a really good place. Even if a guy just wanted to come make a trip out of Stillwater, you’ve got. Besides that, you’ve got Sheridan Lake, that island, Park reservoir, you jump over, you’ve got Cliff Lake, Wade Lake, all of those Hebgen Lake. 01:07:09 Phil: And I’ve, I actually I’ve. You were telling me that Island Park Reservoir has rebounded a bit and the water levels are back up and we’re seeing some bigger fish back in there. 01:07:17 Darren: They’re doing a lot of work on that. There is another organization that is very well funded called the Henry’s Fork Foundation, and they are doing a lot of work on Island Park Reservoir because of course, it it basically what feeds the Henry’s for the rest of the Henry’s fork. Uh, and so they’re doing a lot of work on it, trying to get the water quality better. And that’s going to turn into a better fishery there in the reservoir for us. 01:07:40 Phil: Yeah. Last time I fished it, it was pretty low and pretty tough. And we didn’t bump into two too much. Even launching a boat was challenging. Yeah. 01:07:48 Darren: Yeah. The last couple of years that lake has come back pretty well. 01:07:51 Phil: There’s some nice houses on there too. I remember driving as we headed out. We launched up at the north end near, um. What is it? Uh, what’s the name of the launch up there by the dam? It’s the dam. 01:08:02 Darren: Well, yeah, buttermilk and some of those up there, but yeah, now you’ve got Centennial Shores and there’s a couple of launches in there that you can get a little closer to. 01:08:11 Phil: Yeah. We launched up by the dam and motored through out to the main reservoir. And I remember going by a house that had a helicopter in the backyard. So I thought that was pretty cool. 01:08:21 Darren: Yeah. 01:08:21 Phil: So, Darren, um, I want to thank you for joining me tonight. Uh, it’s been great. You know, we’re talking. I could talk for hours about one of my top ten, uh, Stillwater destinations in the world. Yeah, easy to do. And, uh, you learn every time you go out there. Um, how can people get Ahold of you? You’ve got a little company you started as well called Stillwater, and it’s spelled a little differently. So how do we spell it? 01:08:43 Darren: The water fishing code, the Stillwater is no no vowels. So spell w t r. Yeah. Yeah. We’re just an instructional company. And then this next year for the twenty sixth season, I’ve signed on with a team of guides to do some guiding on. 01:08:59 Phil: Oh, outstanding. 01:09:00 Darren: Which is exciting. After school’s the last couple of years, I’ve had some people say, you need to share your knowledge with the people who want to learn that lake. So we’re going to do that. Easiest way to get Ahold of me is my email is huntsman outdoors at yahoo dot com. Uh, they can get Ahold of me there or. Yeah, there’s also a, a message board there on Stillwater fishing co dot com. 01:09:24 Phil: Stillwater fishing co dot com. And of course you’ve got Instagram too, right? 01:09:29 Darren: You bet. Yeah. On there either Stillwater fishing tool or my personal is Stillwater. 01:09:35 Phil: Stillwater. Skeeter with the vowels missing. 01:09:39 Darren: Not on that. 01:09:40 Phil: one. Yeah. Oh, no. That’s right. Yeah. 01:09:41 Darren: Yeah. On the Stillwater fishing. 01:09:43 Phil: Yeah. We’ll have links to all of those. So if people want to get in touch with you and talk to you more about Henry’s Lake, or perhaps book a day with you on the water. 01:09:50 Darren: Oh, that’d be awesome. 01:09:50 Phil: Yeah. Darren, thanks so much for doing this and talking again, talking about one of my favorite places and your knowledge and expertise on this body of water has certainly been helpful to myself. So I just envy anybody that’s going to book a trip with you and get the benefit of that, because you’ve got all those. 01:10:04 Darren: Years can take one of my idols out, like Phil Rowley and Eric Fish, and good to see that smile in my boat. That would be, yeah, that goofy crooked smile. 01:10:13 Phil: The Nike check mark. My oldest son calls it. Yeah. 01:10:17 Darren: Hey, I appreciate it. We’ll probably see you in Boise here in a little bit. 01:10:20 Phil: Yeah. Looking forward to. 01:10:21 Darren: It. Salt Lake too. 01:10:22 Phil: Yeah. Take care. Darren, thanks for joining me today. 01:10:24 Darren: Thanks, Bill.