Fantastic, Fantastic, FANTASTIC!!

It's what marketing copy is made of. Fish, fish and more fish until we gave up counting! What a BLAST!! It wasn't the number, Giselle Fontanazza, our fishing guide, said. It was the SIZE.

She found me her biggest fish of the season! And not just one, but two lunkers that so totally made my day I was dancing Linda's fish dance all over the boat.

The first one was 20" and that was dance-able---but the second was even bigger. A female full of eggs--21" and 10 1/5" around the belly. That's big and deep for this river. The record is 24".

Giselle knows the river so well and is such an adorable person it was pure pleasure fishing with her. And she was having a ball too. 

I deserve this, she says. I've worked so hard the last 2 weeks and we've caught more fish today than in that whole time, she laughs. She'd say--cast over there close to the shore--we caught both of the big ones in only about 14" of water--or she'd have me cast on the seam, but never in the deep water because we were fishing with drys. Well, a dry with a dropper nymph.

Giselle and her husband guide summers in West Yellowstone, Montana (his home), and summers in Junin de los Andes, Argentina (her home). You can do that when you're splitting your life between two hemispheres. Actually, Travis (her hubby) is a ski instructor at the Yellowstone Club until March and doesn't get to come down here until then, so we didn't get to meet him. 

Jean and boys--you probably have met Travis, or at least seen him, as he's a ski instructor and runs the Thanksgiving races at West Yellowstone each year. Giselle worked the races this year too, as she's also a ski instructor, so you may have actually seen them both. Isn't that just weird how paths cross and people you know, know other people you know? 
 
Anyway, the deep water was Bob's, as he was using a spinning rod. He caught a huge perch--we didn't even know they grew that big, and several rainbows as well. We must have caught 2 or 3 dozen fish--we were having too much fun to keep count.

They gave me a fair amount of crap when I called a 16" rainbow a baby, I can tell you.