Sometimes things get a little fuzzy when the big ones hit. In this case, a water spot on the lens also softened the image of Ryan Gabert and his braggin’-sized ‘bow.

By Kevin Woster

Don’t let the boyish grin fool you. Ryan Gabert can go all GoodFellas on your, uh, self if it means protecting a prized fishing spot.

So, smile or not, I’m not messin’ with the kid by giving it up here in the tules of Take It Outside.

Joe Pesci and a baseball bat couldn’t get it out of me.

Let’s just say it’s a section of public trout water in the Black Hills that feels its share of wadered feet. 

Sunday it felt Ryan’s, and his dad, Dave’s.  The Rapid City father-son fishing team was positively nymphin’ up a storm of trout action with No. 12 and No. 14 Hare’s Ears and Prince Nymphs.

The flies were good enough to eat. The trout proved that.

And the father and son? Well, they proved a lot more about the value of time on the water and the priceless connections a tiny thread of line can make between human beings, and the wild world.

Never one to let the kid have all the fun, Dave Gabert represented the older generation admirably.

Talk about a handful. Ryan Gabert was still talking about this one on Monday at Dakota Angler & Outfitter in downtown Rapid City, where he often tends the shop when owner Hans Stephenson is guiding. Sometimes Ryan also takes time to untangle a flyline-leader-tippet bird’s nest of garantuan proportions brought in by the Black Hills’ Worst Flyfisher (old BHWFF).

Jim Coats of Wall and guests have been enjoying the new water in New Wall Dam this summer, after years of drought sucked recreation potential out of the small lake.

By KW

Speaking of small prairie lakes and recreational potential, as we were in comments to the previous thread, Jim Coats is finding plenty of summer fun at New Wall Dam this year.

The owner of the Cactus Cafe in Wall and his inboard craft are regulars at the small lake southwest of Wall Drug city, thanks to consistent precipitation that has raised water levels there.

Coats and his gang were recreating the heck out of the place the other day, as I pitched jigs along the shore. I caught a few bass, crappies and bluegills, and got bit off twice by northern pike - one of them a brute that boiled out of the vegetation for six or eight feet to blast the bait, make a long, sizzling run back into the reeds and snap my line on the first turn.

Next time? Steel leaders, baby, and maybe some asbestos gloves.

Anyway, I’m going back.

So is Coats and his clan, with different intentions.

Drought? What drought? Not at New Wall Dam, this year.

Hayes Lake is looking good, with water and fish covering what was dusty lake bottom earlier this year. (For a different look at the same stretch of lake, see the March TIO archives…)

By KW

Wintersteen doesn’t miss much when it comes to fish and fishing.

So I figured he was sharp as a barbed hook with his report on TIO last week: “I have it from a reliable source that Hayes Lake has filled up.”

Mary and I checked it out - in passing, literally, from Highway 14/34 - early Saturday morning on the drive east to Highmore for Old Settler’s Days, where the Garrigan Clan congregates most years for a parade, downtown bed races, demolition derby and other festivities. 

No time to cast in the morning. But we made room for a half hour of fish time on the way back that night.

Thanks to Wintersteen’s report, I was armed with the spinning outfit, a couple of 1/16-ounce jig heads and a twister tail or two.

I was hoping for a coule of bluegills, or a crappie or perch, a hammer-handle northern pike or maybe a feisty largemouth bass. Instead, I caught stizostedion vitreum.

It’s nasty stuff, that stizostedion vitreum, but with a few days rest and some penicillin I should be fine.

Naw…. what I have can’t be cured by penicillin, only time on the water.

And stizo is, of course, actually South Dakota’s state fish, not a water-borne illness. This one hit  just before sunset when I pitched a jig into about 18 inches of water in a little pocket of vegetation off the end of the old boat ramp at Hayes, maybe eight feet from shore.

And suddenly it got pretty wild in those weedy shallows. I got giddy, and wet. And the walleye got dry - just long enough for a photo…

Who’s that behind those Foster Walleyes?

With enough line and weight, a guy might be able to cast a jig just far enough…

By KW

OK, we didn’t manage to fish from the rim of the Bighorn Canyon. But we sure caught our breath.

Wow.

Seriously.

Wow.

How does a guy get to be 56 years old before he looks down into the grand canyon of the Bighorn River, a national recreation area of stunning beauty and widespread repute? Why does it take some prodding from a 26-year-old son to get him there?

Just does, sometimes.

Been to Powell (a fine little community that produced a fine Rapid City Journal reporter named Kayla Gahagan). Been to Lovell.  Greybull. Burgess Junction. Even been to the Medicine Wheel. Bighorn Canyon? Never been, until this week.

Casey and I spent two days, a fair amount of gas and some serious road time checking out the Big Horn Mountains and their environs before he leaves for a summer in the Dominican Republic and I return from a week vacation to begin a summer in the Republic of Rapid City Journal.

Guess who’s more excited?

Anyway, it’s plenty wet out Big Horn way, as you can see from raging Ten Sleep Creek down below. Also plenty snowy up along U.S. 14A - so much so that the guy plowing a trail past the parking lot at the Bighorn Medicine Wheel passed the word through another would-be tourist that the spiritually significant wheel was hidden under about 10 feet of snow and we should turn the Versa around and head back to the asphalt.

The “Road Closed” sign back on 14A said much the same thing.

Maybe next year for the Medicine Wheel for Casey, as we’ve begun plotting another road trip.

And I guarantee, I won’t wait 56 years for my return to the Bighorn Canyon.

But next trip, I’m taking a fishing pole - extra long.

The lower portion of the access road to Medicine Wheel. Don’t even ask about the upper portion.

Wait, isn’t it just two days until summer?

A hike along Ten Sleep Creek, just up the canyon from the town of Ten Sleep, is a lesson in raw, wet power.

Seriously, you go on ahead. I’ll wait for the bus.

First cast, first fish at Angostura Reservoir (Polovich, McEnroe, how about that horizon?)

By KW

How sweet it is.

When you get hammered by a hefty largemouth bass on the second crank of your first cast of the day, life is good.

When you get smoked by a smallmouth on the sixth cast, it’s even better.

And when a feisty black crappie climbs aboard a couple flips of the jig later, you have to wonder what you did to deserve such gifts.

Seven smallmouths, two largemouths and three crappies later, you’re still wondering.

And that’s not all. You also get to chat with a father and son as they cast their hope into the shallows of the marina bay, check out the spectacle of another Saturday-morning-come-to-life at a popular state recreation area and wander around the theatrical hills sniffing bright bits of vegetation.

It started out with a bang and turned into a full-fledged blast.

All for the price of a couple of jigs, a state parks sticker, a quarter tank of that precious, $4 gasoline and a little time.

Pretty good deal, I’d say.

Daren Smith of Rapid City and his 7-year-old son, Nico, engage in an age-old ritual of renewal.

Flooded cottonwoods and other vegetation add important habitat and expanded fishing waters on Angostura.

Even on a fishing trip, don’t forget to stop and smell the roses.

By KW

Like to give the Game, Fish & Parks Department a piece of your mind? Here’s your chance, as long as it’s about either sage grouse or Black Hills deer.

GF&P biologists just finished  management plans for Black Hills deer and sage grouse.

 “Both plans have gone through an internal review process, and now we are making them available to the public for further comment,” said GF&P game-program manager Tom Kirschenmann said in a news release.  “These management plans will provide a working framework for the department and guide our efforts in meeting management objectives.”A 30-day public comment period on the management plans starts on June 11. See the plans at the department Web site at http://www.sdgfp.info/SageGrousePlan.htm or http://www.sdgfp.info/BlackHillsDeerPlan.htm where they are available in PDF format.  

Send written comments to Kirschenmann at the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department, 523 E. Capitol Ave., Pierre, SD 57501 or e-mail them to wildinfo@state.sd.us.

And be nice.

Personally, I think GF&P is doing a fine job managing both sage grouse and Black Hills deer.

I presume everyone agrees.

P.S. OK, it’s official: I take the silence from Take It Outside viewers to mean complete satisfaction and affirmation of GF&P management policies on sage grouse and Black Hills deer. Kudos to the folks in brown. On to the next issue.

 

 

Bear Butte Lake is living up to it name again, thanks to the soggy weather pattern.

By KW

 Driving past Bear Butte Lake last Friday, I saw something strange: water.

What the, hey?

There’s water in Bear Butte Lake - that friendly little pond across the highway from the sacred mountain of the same name. I haven’t seen water there, worth mentioning, for years.

Actually, there’s water in plenty of lakes and ponds and stock dams - and my garage, but that’s another story - where there hasn’t been much to mention for years.

GF&P is hustling to come up with an adjusted fish-stocking plan to handle all the “new” or improved public fishing water (you can read more about that in my Journal online story, or in the “paper news product” tomorrow). Some of fthe new fins might end up wiggling in Bear Butte Lake.

It’s not a great fishing lake. But when water is up, it can be pretty good for crappies, largemouth bass and northern pike.

It could still use another shot of rain, which the soggy weather pattern seems likely to deliver. Then it’ll probable get a few fish from GF&P, although they could take a while to grow big enough to capture your attention.

Meanwhile, I think lakes are prettier when they have some water in them, don’t you?

 

With a hooked catfish hung up in a sub-surface snag at Orman Dam, Scott Warner ponders his next move.

By KW

Don’t leave home without it.

Your fishing rod, that is.

That’s my motto, even when I’m leaving home, or town, on a Journal assignment.

There are good reasons for that, other than my career-long propensity to sneak in a little fishing on newspaper time. (As always, this is a confidential conversation that shouldn’t be shared with my employers…)

But there are other advantages in being armed with a sweet, 6-foot sliver of graphite. Take Friday, when I was covering the flooding in Belle Fourche and locked my keys in the pickup.

There they were on the driver’s seat. And there I was, feeling the buzz of a Taco John’s burrito, standing outside with a dopey look on my face. (Dopier, even, than normal.)

That could have messed up the rest of my workday, if not for the Shakespeare - the rod and reel, not The Bard - lying in the bed of my Nissan.

In addition, the window in the passenger’s door was about two inches shy of completed rolled up (that’s literally  “rolled,” since the windows of my 2005 Frontier are hand operated). So through a nifty combination of angling and arcade game, I snagged the keys on the seat with the rod tip and soon was back in the truck and the reporting business.

Next stop was the Belle Fourche Reservoir, better known as Orman Dam, where another part of my road kit came in handy. Arizona visitor Scott Warner hooked a channel catfish, only to have it swim down into the concrete slabs and rebar used for bank stabilization near the main boat ramp.

“I’ve got some hip boots,” I said.

“You’re kidding,” Warner grinned.

At the Journal, we never kid about hip boots or catfish.

I sloshed around carefully in the almost-crotch-deep water and its sunken snags  to help Warner free the channel cat pictured below.

He went back to his fishing, and I turned to my other reporter’s tools - the pen and notebook.

Which weren’t nearly so much fun.

With catfish in hand, Scott Warner proves that a little patience, and a hip-booted reporter, can pay off.

Ryan Gabert hooks up with a Missouri River smallmouth below Oahe Dam, as John Holmgren lets one go. (Photos, and straight horizons, by Caster Don himself.)

By Caster Don

I know it’s tough to keep the camera steady while holding a bass in one hand, balancing on the slippery rocks and trying not to fall in the water.

Next time, hold the bass without the horizon in the background. Also, to become a better fly caster you have to cast, cast, cast. Try leaving the ultralight spinning rod home next time.

With the complaints out of the way I want you to know that we missed crossing lines by a couple of hours Sunday.

I loaded the van with Rapid City fly casters Dick Leir, Jon Holmgren and Keith Bryson. We got an early start to cast in the Pierre area. We met up with Hans Stephenson and Ryan Gabert( from Dakota Angler).

It was a fine day of fishing with the group catching eight species of fish, all on flies. After spending most of the day in the Pierre area we moved to Fort Thompson and finished the day catching walleyes on streamers. The reason for the trip East was the high muddy waters of the Black Hills streams and the river fish starting the feed.

I would suggest to anyone to take a drive anyplace in western South Dakota now. The fresh spring colors are amazing throughout the day. The cattle grazing in dew-covered fields just after daybreak, the contrast of the bright green fields against the blue sky of the midday sun, and the deep shadows of the evening.

South Dakota is beautiful right now. The sights are worth paying a little extra for gas.

Caster Don crew member Keith Bryson & smallmouth.