FISHING -- A fly fisher friend told me he was calling in sick and heading to the St. Joe River this week. He had a cruel grin on his face because he knew I couldn't join him.  We both have heard the reports.   Fishing around the region in this unseasonably nice weather has been great.

Sean Visintainer of Silver Bow Fly Shop confirms the buzz in his weekly fishing report:

If you are not out fishing this month, you are missing out! Is it banner? No, but it's great for November!

It seems that mother nature mixed up the sequence of months between October and November, just check out the forecast....

"I actually wish we had some more rain/cloud cover again; that really brought out the blue-winged olives last month on the Spokane and made for some great dry fly action. This weekend could bring that back.

We are still getting good reports from the lower St. Joe and Coeur d'Alene Rivers, too. October caddis are lingering around, BWO's, and midges. The window for dry fly fishing is short from noonish to 4ish, but, hey it's NOVEMBER and we are still talking about dry flies!

The word from down south on the steelhead rivers is good. The guides last weekend did well on the Grande Ronde reporting multiple fish days, some of the best numbers we've had all season. Most of the fish being caught too are larger in the 8-10 pound range. Swinging sink-tips is finding them pretty well reports Travis De Boer, our lead Grande Ronde guide. The hot bead stones and egg patterns will always work this time of the year too. The eggs in particular being the best of the two.

Good reports coming from the Clearwater as well for guys nymphing. Supposedly the B-run is the 3rd best we've had in the last 10 years.

Creel checkers on the Ronde upstream from Boggan's Oasis late last week said anglers were having a little more in Oregon from the Stateline up to Troy as opposed to the anglers from Boggan's up to the stateline.   And the Oregon anglers were better at doing the requested service of catching and harvesting fin-clipped steelhead for the benefit of wild fish.

During the creek check anglers downstream from the stateline caught 10 fin-clipped steelhead and kept five. Anglers upstream from the stateline caught 33 fin-clipped steelies and kept 30.