Additional fishing license requirements are ahead for Montana this summer.  Starting May 15th Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks will require and additional "pass," in addition to your regular fishing license, to fish in Montana during the 2017 season.  This pass is presumably to fund extended efforts to keep damaging aquatic invasive species from ruining Montana's fisheries after the discovery of invasive aquatic mussels in several Montana waterways.

"Starting Monday, May 15, all anglers will need to purchase an Aquatic Invasive Species Prevention Pass (APP) from FWP.  Invasive Species staffers plan to have the pass available from FWP license vendors and online after this coming Monday.  Cost: residents: $2; nonresidents: $15."
- Fishing Outfitters Association of Montana

​Be sure to check out the new Madison River fishing report section on the Madison River fly fishing section of this site.  I plan to frequently update the reports and I have added some resources that myself and many of the local guides use on a daily basis.  Things like streamflow graphs, water temperature graphs NOAA Weather forecasts and snowpack maps are all there.  I am hoping that this will be a good resource for anyone who wants to know what is happening on the Madison River.

It seems that the winter-like spring that we were having has abruptly left us as of the past few days.  The air temperatures are now pushing into the upper 70s and the Madison River water temperatures are climbing well above 50 degrees on both the upper and lower river.  When that happens this time of year we start seeing lots of Caddis.  The Mother's Day caddis hatch is on and there are bugs everywhere.  The lower Madison is my favorite area to target this hatch but there is plenty of good fishing to be had on the upper river as well.  There are some march brown mayflies out and we still have midges and blue winged olives on the far upper river.  

The fishing has been really good lately.  On the right day you can have big numbers of fish that are above the average sizes that we see most of the year and see very few other anglers.  It has been a lot of fun.  If the snow starts to melt and we have some dirty water coming through the river, there should always be places to have really good fishing. At times having all of the fish piled into a few feet of water along the banks is in our favor even if there is very little visibility in the water. I have seen some real slaughters in really dirty high water conditions.  For now we have plenty of water clarity throughout the Madison river.  

The land of the giants is also a great option at this time of year and it is invincible to runoff.  The "catching" at LOG has been so good that people think that I am lying when I tell them.  One angler put it well  when he said at the end of the day "I couldn't put a number on it...but I could put a title on it."  I still have dates open through May for land of the giants trips.