I have always said, “When the fish are biting I can catch them”. So when I heard that the trout were biting on Holter Reservoir, I couldn’t wait to get over there and start fishing. Typically, the lakes over by Helena-Canyon Ferry, Hauser and Holter all become very good trout fisheries in September.

Steve Hellegaard from Missoula fished with me on Tuesday and boy were the fish biting. We ended up hooking 30 trout and ended up with 10 nice trout in the 17-20 inch range. We tried walleye fishing and didn’t have bite in 3 hours. What did I say about when the fish are biting? Well the walleyes were not biting.

The next day Jaye Johnson from Charlo joined me and the trout fishing was the same-“Red Hot”. I started to try out different lures on the four rods that we were using just to see how many lures would actually catch fish. I am here to tell you the number of lures that ended up catching at least one trout was incredible.

I took a picture of all of them and you can see with your own to eyes how many lures we used and what kind they were. It ranged from rapalas to thomas cyclone to syclops to macks lures. On Tuesday and Wednesday the lure of choice was a syclops fire tiger but on Thursday the lure that worked the best was Montana Outdoor Radio Show 2011 guaranteed lure with Walleye Waynes autograph. Walleye Wayne is not just a walleye catcher anymore! The red flat fish also got a lot of trout attention in Thursday too!

All three days we fished from 10-14 feet deep in about 65-70 feet of water trolling at 2 miles per hour around Cottonwood Creek by Oxbow Bend. We limited out on “Trout Keepers” by 2pm Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday we had 9 nice trout by 11am when we decided to head for home.

Fishing should continue to be excellent on Holter Reservoir for at least a week or so. Good Luck and have fun!