BCJ_SUMMER17 Digital Edition

INSTRUCTIONAL
Tim Romano photo
SCURRY
2
“What you should do is grab a
mouse and throw it in the water and
watch him try to run across there. I
try to make that happen,” Kelly said.
“I don’t do, on anything, a steady retrieve.
Ever. From a caddis to a fleeing
bait fish to a mouse. They don’t tend
to be real consistent. I’ve hucked them in the lake and watched
them. They take off.”
Many anglers, he says, fish a mouse slowly and consistently,
swinging down and across like one might skate a waked fly for
steelhead or Atlantic salmon. Real mice know the dangers that
lurk beneath the surface and try to spend as little time in the
water as possible.
“I’ve seen them go 20 feet without stopping, in a total panic,”
Kelly said. “You can see it’s panic. They’re not doing exercise laps.
A lot of guys like to make them go real consistent. I don’t. I’m just
trying to mimic nature.”
MIGHTY MOUSE
BY SAM LUNGREN
KELLY GALLOUP’S IS A MIND INNOVATIVE ENOUGH to
create a streamer pattern as revolutionary and popular as the
Sex Dungeon, and strange enough to name it the Sex Dungeon.
During my last conversation with the author, outfitter and BHA
life member, he started to wonder aloud how much an actual
mouse weighs – obviously to make his mouse flies more accurate.
“They probably weigh four or five ounces. Maybe not that,”
Kelly pondered. “I should trap one and weigh that ******. You
know what, that’s going to make me set my trap right now. Jeremy,
remind me to check this trap tomorrow.”
The last bit he shouted across his fly shop, the Slide Inn on
Montana’s Madison River, to an employee. He went on to praise a
new mouse pattern Jeremy had been tying and using regularly on
the Madison and nearby Quake Lake.
“You’re getting a lot more people actually doing it on purpose,”
Kelly said of fishing mouse flies. “A lot of the guys would mouse
while they were walking back to the car. That was about it. But
they didn’t really go and fish them. Now, I’m seeing guys actually,
intentionally going and fishing them. Things are changing; they’re
starting to figure stuff out.”
Targeting giant brown trout and other fish at night with flies
58 | BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL SUMMER 2017
LIGHTS DOWN LOW
1
Kelly has spent hundreds of hours below
the surface of Western trout rivers
in scuba gear to observe fish behavior.
He says that brown trout, especially
large ones, almost exclusively eat at
night.
“I think it’s that predatory thing.
They’re virtually complete nocturnal creatures,” Kelly said. “So
are rainbows and all fish, really.
“The fish at night have moved shallow and they’re hunting.
They moved there to eat. Something that creates that much stimulus
going across the water, it’s gonna die.”
If you’re like most anglers who find fishing in the daylight to
be drastically more convenient than blindly flailing in the darkness,
mouse fishing is still a valuable arrow in the quiver. The best
resembling mice is by no means a new idea. Kelly has been doing
it for about 45 years and says his father was doing it as early as the
1940s. They would often fish mice where he grew up in Michigan
as an alternative to Hexagenia limbata, whenever the large, nocturnally-hatching
mayflies failed to appear on a nighttime float.
But the same problem has dogged him as it has many a mouse
angler, myself included: how to turn trout attacks into hookups.
“If you night mouse, you know when people have actually done
it,” Kelly said. “‘Cause, if they talk about the great nights, they’re
so full of it, it’s crazy. It is blow up, after blow up, after tug, after
blow up to get a positive eat. It was like, so frustrating, you knew
you might get three dozen blowups a night and not hook a fish
that night. In the daytime, you wouldn’t get half as many eats, but
they generally were a positive hookup. I don’t know why. But, it’ll
change I think with the new kids coming along.”
Getting the hook to stick is the hard part, but, he says, there’s
no better way to get the attention of the biggest trout of your life.
“I just think they track that big chunk of meat and eat it. It’s
just kind of one of those things,” Kelly said. “Mice aren’t in that
water constantly, and it’s something that I think big trout almost
have to respond to.”
Sam is the editor of Backcountry Journal and is going to mouse
more nights this summer. But he always says that.
mouse fishing I’ve ever seen went down on a high desert tailwater
in the middle of a July day. It had been well over 80 degrees for
the prior three days before storm clouds rolled in, darkening the
sky and spitting lightning and a little light rain. Trout kept taking
our streamers the second they’d hit the water by the bank, so we
switched to mice. A few dozen trout attacked the rodent that day.
We landed maybe four or five, but had a blast doing it.
Kelly explains that clouds, especially dark storms, create a virtual
nighttime. Predatory fish can ambush better in lower light and
they may feel more comfortable exposing themselves.
But when he does fish in the dark, Kelly likes it to be really
dark. “I really prefer to have just zero light and make them track
it. For me personally, it’s just always better on low-light conditions.
Now I say that, but I’ve also had good nights on full moons
and waning moons.”
SLOW THE SET
BOOTY SWING
4
After once pulling five dead shrews
out of a dead brown trout’s stomach,
he briefly got excited about fishing two
mouse flies at a time – anything to make
mouse fishing more effective.
“On the first night I fished them tandem,
and I got a double and I thought
‘Holy crap, I cracked the code’ and ‘Oh my God, I’m a genius!’”
Kelly said. “Then I never got another fish on when I was running
it tandem. So that was out the window.”
He tried everything from a big treble hook on the tail to many
tiny treble hooks along the tail. Hooks on bottom, hooks on top,
EXPERIMENT
3
“You tend to beat your fish,” Kelly
said. “On the hook set, really, if you
can compose yourself, just like with a
steelhead eat, feel it pull and set the
hook. Don’t rail on it when you hear it
’cause it’s night and you react just a little
quicker than you really should. So,
hold back if you can.”
That fighter pilot composure is difficult, especially for fly anglers
trained in fast reactions. Because mice are relatively large,
trout often need extra time to mouth the fly. I think they sometimes
try to stun or disorient a mouse by nudging or slapping it
first, then coming around to eat on the second pass. If you have
the presence of mind to not rip the fly out of the water until you
feel weight, you might get another shot.
“I don’t like fast rods for mousing, I like a softer rod,” Kelly
said. “Mostly for hook set.”
hooks forward, hooks back.
“Then I started thinking that, ya know, they hang their butt
down in when they swim,” Kelly said. “That one truly made a
difference. That was when I started getting positive hookups and
a lot less, ya know, blow ups. Just weighting.”
Many modern mouse patterns now employ a stinger hook, like
the Mr. Hankey, or an articulated body with the hook hanging
lower in the water.
“If you watch them, they keep their heads up,” Kelly said.
“Their asses are down and they’re paddling with their back feet
and they’re paddling with their front feet to keep their front up.”
5
“I’m seeing a big influence in these
kids coming along,” Kelly said. “They’re
not worrying as much about the floaty
as they are making the thing wake. I
think it’s more figuring out where the
fly belongs in the water as opposed to
making it look round and puffy like a
mouse. I mean, if you think about how most mice patterns are,
everything’s on the back and everything’s puffy and the thing’s
not like that. It’s hanging its ass down in the water. But basically
everybody has mimicked the same idea.”
Kelly said people are moving in the right direction, away from
the traditional deer hair flies, by employing foam and popper
heads along with more realistic furs like muskrat, beaver, even rat.
Articulated bodies are becoming more common, as is weighting
the fly to ride lower. Fly fishing and tying often reward experimentation,
and mousing
is still relatively uncharted
territory.
Two days after talking
to Kelly, he texted me a
photo of a dead mouse he
trapped, on a scale. Four
and a half ounces, exactly
in between his two guesses.
Mouse fishing is hard, but
it rewards those who experiment
– with conditions,
season, presentation, materials
– sometimes in a very
big way.
SUMMER 2017 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 59