…but of course I can’t fish.  I have managed to get out a few times but helping my daughter prepare for her last big tournament as a junior wrestler, U.S.Jr Nationals in Fargo, ND, has pretty much taken priority over all non-work related activities.  6 more weeks and I get my life back as she shifts gears and becomes a college student-athlete and I lose my wrestling coach-dad status.  A bittersweet proposition for sure.

Anyway…

In the lowland streams with some distance from the Cascade crest, the levels are dropping, the water is warming and the trout are feeding.  I got out a couple times over the last two weeks and the fishing was quite good.  The flows are edging into the ‘juuust right’ zone on my favorite spring spots.  Weather permitting, I’ll be fishing a lot more from here on out – a multiday trip to north Idaho is coming up and the prospect of many short runs to the Olympic Peninsula for summer steelhead have me frantically tying small buggy steelhead patterns.

A likely spot…

The payoff!

Bamboo and wild iris.

On a nearly unrelated note…  My new bamboo rod is nearing completion.  I’m planning a long, detailed post including the origin of the taper and photos of the build process but here’s a teaser.  The rod will be an 8′ hollowbuilt 3wt made by master craftsman, Rob Hoffhines off an innovative taper dreamed up by Tom Smithwick.  I’m having a hard time with the wait for this one!

The beginnings:

Not long now!

For the first time this season, the trout seemed to be looking up.  I was solo on a favorite small stream today.  Flows were still a bit high, too high for my best spots but I was thankful to be able to fish at all.  The first pulse of spring snowmelt runoff has hit and most rivers are running high and brown…

The flows on this stream were slightly higher than when I visited 2 weeks ago but the fish behavior was completely different.  The fish were actively feeding on the surface, or maybe just under.  There was a lot of insect activity with a several type of mayflies hatching.  In the morning, Blue-winged Olives were popping off consistently but that faded around midday.  From there on, red-quills were hatching all afternoon with a few larger March Browns mixed in.  Lots of other bugs flittering about, small stoneflies and lots of midges and flying ants.  I even saw a rare Adams fly perched on a Trillium…

I’m not sure how many cutthroats were brought to hand, double digits for sure.  Two fish in particular were fairly large for this stream, running about 12-14″ but of course I wasn’t able to get a photo of either.  I’ve mostly decided to stop stop taking photos of fish unless I can do it while keeping them in the water or can return them very quickly.  These two were while in a very precarious spot so I wasn’t able to get the camera out without stressing the fish so they’ll live in my memory and fishing log…

As usual, my hot fly was a softhackle.  Not usual was the method of delivery…  The winning ticket today was a #16 Starling & Green presented on a dead drift.  I tied it on as a trailer to my favorite caddis imitation, my mylar bodied Elk & CDC.  The high floating dry fly kept the softhackle just under the surface and enabled me to track the drift.  Both of the bigger fish took the softhackle dropper while a couple small fish hit the caddis.  I missed one fish that made my heart race, it was probably the biggest fish I’ve seen in that river, maybe 18″ or so.  Now I know where he lives…  The photo below shows one of the pretty cutthroats that took the  S&G softhackle.

While sitting on a log, I heard a load crashing from across the stream.  At first, I thought it was a few blacktail deer but they are usually stealthy as the move along the banks.  Then I saw a bunch  of black shapes moving through the brush and I was sure it was a pack of wild dogs so I started reaching for my bear spray in case they crossed the stream.  I was very surprised when a family of 5(!) otters popped out of the bushes.  They were much larger than I what I remembered for river otters, easily as big as a medium sized dog.  Kicking myself for not having my camera out, I whistled at them to get their attention.  One of them gave me a quick glance then ignored me like the other four as they started working upstream.  I figured that was a good time for me to change direction and head downstream as they are probably better at fishing than me!

The weather was really nice this weekend and combined with high but reasonable flows on my favorite early season stream lead to my first real trout fishing of 2012.  Steelhead are, of course, just be sea-run rainbow trout but you know what I mean…

The flows were still a little too high for my favorite pseudo-secret spot so I went to an area a little more accessible but still off the beaten path.  A hike and some bushwhacking got us plenty of untouched water and a few willing trout.  I missed one nice fish early in the day when I wasn’t paying attention but broke my skunk in a later run.  Fishing partner, MK picked up a couple fish on the way downstream, the second was a very nice cutthroat taken from a difficult lie on a soggy red quill dry fly.

Later in the day in a glassy, spring creek-like section, I picked up a couple trout.  The first was a small cutthroat that was rising across the river, taking something just below the surface, probably red quill emergers.  I was fishing a softhackle with a traditional wet fly swing but cast upstream to this fish anyway.  The trout immediately took the Primrose & Partridge (=confidence fly) and was landed shortly after.  A bit downstream, we saw a very large rise near a rock outcrop that has produced a few nice fish in the past.  A roll cast across, a big mend and slow swing yielded a jarring take from a fat 13-14″ coastal cutthroat.  It was the fist ‘nice fish’ of the season, exactly one week earlier than last year and taken from nearly the same spot!

This was also my first day fishing a new reel.  It is a handmade reproduction of a Hardy 1912 Perfect.  The reel is made by a master machinist and artist named Chris Henshaw in England.  I also have one of Chris’ large salmon reels that I use for steelhead so when this little trout reel became available, I had to snag it.  A couple new bamboo trout rods should arrive in late spring and this reel should be just right for the 8′ 3wt which will probably become my ‘go to’ small stream rod.  To be continued…

My tradition the last couple years has been to avoid the crowd on the river during the run up to Christmas but to make sure I get to the river on New Year’s day to get the angling year started.  It’s usually cold as hell on 01/01 and if it’s not cold then it is surely raining and windy.  I figure that if I can make that little sacrifice of personal fishing misery, the spirits that guide the rolls of the fly fishing dice might just tip them my way every now and then later in the year…

Not sure if that plan will play out this season.  Family obligations and some particularly nasty weather patterns are shaping up to hit around New Year’s Day.  If possible, I’ll get out there just to throw a couple casts and call it ‘good’ but I’m playing it by ear at this point.

Unusual for me, I actually did some pre-Xmas fishing this season.  My daughter caught a nasty cold and had to pull out of a two-day wrestling tournament for which I had secured vacation time.  Since the office was slow due to the holiday, I decided to go ahead and use the days for a little winter steelhead fishing.  The first day I worked through a well-known run on the Skykomish, my closest steelhead river.  Given the extremely dry December (in a La Nina year?), the levels were very low.  I was using my normal winter outfit, Guideline Le Cie 13789 spey rod, Rio Skagit Flight shooting head and 10′ T-11/14 sink tip.  However, due to the low water, after losing a couple flies, I switched to a lighter Rio MOW tip that was 5′ floating/5′ sink tip which had my fly ticking the rocks every so often but not snagging the gaps in the sunken boulders.

Looking upstream to a set of rapids that makes this a natural resting point for salmon/steelhead.  Note the dead Chum salmon in the right foreground.

My usual fishing method for this run is a variant on the traditional cast>swing>step down>cast… pattern employed on salmon & steelhead rivers all over the world.  If there is no one fishing behind me, I’ll make two casts per spot.  The pattern is cast>swing>cast>step down>swing.  The difference being that on the second cast, I step down to the next stance right as the fly starts its swing. This gets the fly a little deeper while putting me into position to cover the next bit of water.  If I’m casting consistently, it also puts the fly in front of a fish twice.

Oh yeah… the underwater rocks in this section of the Sky’ are basketball-beachball sized and slicker than goose-shit as they are covered with a combination of fine sediment and algae.  Three casts in to the run, as I’m stepped down through a precarious bit of wading, I feel the tell-tale tug of a fish.  I reached toward the fish to give him a little slack to turn then when I felt pressure again, I set hard to the bank and immediately got the solid run of a well-hooked fish.  I also slipped off the rock I was standing on and went up to my chest in the water.  Fighting the fish and climbing to more secure footing was a little too exciting but I managed to get myself set to land the fish.  After a couple runs, I worked the fish to me until only the sinktip and tippet were outside the rod tip.  It appeared to an average sized hatchery steelhead of 5-6 pounds or so.  I was fully planning on giving it the ‘stone shampoo’ and taking it home for dinner when I felt what all fly fishermen dread, the sudden loss of line tension.  Either through my poor fish handling skills or bad luck, the barbless hook slipped and the fish glided slowly back out into the river.  I wanted to dive in after the damn thing…

Glutton for punishment, I drove up to the Sauk River the following day.  I love the Sauk…  It is just a beautiful river basin surrounded by snow covered Cascade peaks, really an amazing place.  Too bad there are no steelhead in it any more.  The river no longer gets hatchery plants and the very depressed wild run would be later in the season.  With that in mind, I was targeting “Dollies” or Dolly Varden (which are really Bull Trout in this river) with a lighter spey rod, the Guideline Le Cie 13778.

I fished a couple of the better known spots downstream from the Suiattle confluence with no luck but the weather was mild and with the scenery, it was still very enjoyable fishing.  Moving to a lesser known spot I stumbled across in my ramblings, I managed to hook up with what felt like a decent fish but similar to the previous day, it came unbuttoned before I could land it.  I didn’t see this one but based on the river, season and bulldogging, non-aerial fight, I’m pretty sure it was a bull trout.

Two days, two hook-ups, no fish but good fishing is good enough…

A December river is dark and cold, though not so cold as it will be, and full running before the frosts of January and February cut down the flow from the hills.  December on the coast has dark, wet days when it is easy to be up at dawn and almost natural to be out at dusk…  -Roderick Haig-Brown, A River Never Sleeps

In another section of the December chapter, RHB notes that November is the end of the season for the fly fisherman when many will be tempted to lay down their rods and tie flies or otherwise stay away from the river.  This was certainly the case for me as I did no fishing at all in November.  I did, however, true to form, tie a lot of flies…  He later notes that December is actually the beginning of the fishing season, corresponding with the arrival of winter steelhead.  In my local rivers the hatchery steelhead start showing in the coastal rivers around Thanksgiving and probably peak in December before the low flows and heavy angling pressure put them off the bite even more than normal due to their hatchery origins.  Given the kid’s wrestling schedule, other than the odd impromptu run to the Skykomish, it looks like my winter steelheading will be limited to a few trips for wild fish later in the season.

This past weekend was a rare no-wrestling weekend that corresponded with unseasonably warm temps and sunny skies.  Instead of swinging for steelhead, I took advantage of the pleasant conditions to do some hiking on a smaller stream.  I took along the Smithwick 8′ 4wt “wet fly rod” and a few softhackles.  I wasn’t really fishing so much as purging my lungs and spirit of dehumidified, heater-scrubbed office air.  No fish, of course, but otherwise a very nice 3 hours.

People who have read this blog before will note a few changes.  In anticipation of the new year, I have updated the presentation template.  I have also added a gear review page.  In January, I’ll be adding two more topic-centric pages: fly patterns and videos.

Happy Holidays!