The Runoff She Has Begun!!

 

Fasten your seatbelts, gang, as Runoff 2008 has officially begun! 

 

As indicated in the attached Rock Creek Discharge chart (a link to which can be found in updated form on Der Blog right below the Missoula weather update), using Rock Creek as our benchmark, this quite gardenhosesque stream that a month ago was flowing at the rate of 145 cubic feet per second on April 1^st (no foolin’), is now already flowing at nearly five times that rate, quickly to ascend to over 2500 cfs, or over 20 times its sleepy early April volume.

 

Like last year, this chart really becomes our barometer for when the fishing on the major rivers will come into its own.  Now, the rivers are marginally fishable, and, soon with increased water flow, will become the color of chocolate milk and unfishable—fish don’t and won’t feed on what they can’t safely see.  So watch the redlined graph climb (this year perhaps right off the upper limit of our chart) and the, when the water flow begins to subside the rivers will clear up and thereafter (and only thereafter) will the rivers become fishable, then in their “prime time” condition. 

 

Again using Rock Creek as a barometer, that river will quickly become too cloudy and too rapid for any kind of either good or safe fishing and, after the peak of the flow, when the flow subsides to around 1850 cfs only then will the fishing conditions again become decent…on the major rivers, last year, two days before the arrival of our first group.

 

Notably, however, right on schedule, the runoff has now begun and you will now be able to chart with amazing accuracy, two days later, the changes, up and down, in Montana’s fickle Rocky Mountain Spring weather pattern(s).

 

It has begun…it has begun…it has begun!!!

 

Rock Creek Ron