The Pacific coast is generous to anglers, perhaps too generous, but at least this generosity demands of them that they see and know the waters in all their moods and all their months… -Roderick Haig-Brown, A River Never Sleeps

October can be great.  Or it can be terrible…  There are plenty of different objectives for the late-fall fly fisherman in the Pacific Northwest.  Unfortunately, they are all very weather-dependent and the weather in October seemingly cannot be predicted by professional meteorologists much less me so I try to be flexible and have just a bit of blind faith optimism that opportune conditions will present.

This year, the double-dip la Nina weather pattern seems to have materialized after all and we’ve transitioned into the cool, cloudy weather for which Seattle is so famous.  The small streams where I most enjoy chasing trout are all rising and cooling.  As you’d expect, the fish are less eager to take flies other than the warmest hours of late afternoon.

Hoping to get one last day of dry fly trout fishing in this season, I took co-worker/friend/fishing partner, MK, to my favorite little stream that I never mention by name, especially on the interwebs.

The fishing started rather slow.  The cool night had likely lowered the water temperature enough that the trouts were sleeping late, not particular interested in the bits of feather and thread that we were putting in front of them.  Working our way downstream, we fished traditional softhackles on a wet fly swing.  A few smaller fish were landed over several hours as we hiked & fished to our terminal point.

At a spot where the new river channel takes a hard left into very dense forest, we turned back upstream, clipped off the wet flies and replaced them with a dry fly pattern that I developed to be an impressionistic representation of larger caddis found in our rivers this time of year.  The warming day (but still cool at about 60F), energized the trout and the fishing was steady for the hike back up river.  Quite a few pretty small stream trout were landed including several that were decent sized for this little river.

Late in the day, I managed to hook a very large trout for this stream.  It was big enough that I played it from the reel and needed to be careful of the light tippet I was using.  After the cuthroat rolled and showed his size, the line suddenly went slack and I watched him glide away into the pool…  Earlier in the day, I had hooked another large trout with exactly the same results and given the failing light, I reconciled myself to a pretty nice last day of small stream trout fishing in 2011.

As I was reeling in, I noticed a small dink rise near the far side of the pool where I had just hooked the big cutt.  On the third cast, there was a gentle sipping rise to my fly.  Setting the hook, I shouted to MK that it was “just another average trout” but then the fish cleared the water and landed with a splash that sounded like someone threw a cantaloupe in the river.  The ‘kerploosh’ was followed by the wonderful scream of my little 90yr old Farlow gear/pawl reel.  My ‘dink’ was actually Hog Johnson or his brother and I sure as hell didn’t want to lose another big trout.  After several more nice jumps and runs, I led a very nice coastal cutthroat to shore, definitely outsized for this little river.  It was a great way to end the day and the season and gave me a memory I’ll need to carry close at hand during the many winter steelhead skunkings to come…

…probably the millions of rotting pink salmon in the coastal rivers.  I was out on Saturday fishing for non-existent steelhead amidst a horde of dead and dying pinks.  Even worse than the rotting humpies slowly rolling in the shallows were the dead but still swimming zombie slimers moving around in the river, pinto patterned with fungus and rot but still energetic enough to roll and splash a bit. All that death…

…creating life.  The thing is, the Puget Sound coastal rivers would be a lot more dead without the death of the pink and other pacific salmon.  The steep gradients and perennial winter spate combined with low alkalinity equal a sterile river environment.  The dying salmon carcasses provide much needed organic matter to feed microorganisms and everything else on up the food chain.  What’s really frightening is that the pinks are the only thing left in any numbers.  The wild Chinook and Coho are pretty much gone.  With the good stuff fished out, the target became the lowly Chums.  Now even the Chums are scarce, decimated for their roe, being shipped to the far east.  It’s only a matter of time for the pinks to become the next target and our coastal rivers and their anadromous fisheries even in their current sorry state will be a thing of the past.

While getting fired up for fall steelhead on the Columbia tributaries, I can’t help but feel the pull to get in one or two last days of trout fishing.  Seemingly over a few days, we went from high Summer to Fall.  Even the trees haven’t caught up -  many of the aspens, willows and other bankside trees going straight from green to brown, altogether skipping the colorful transition that guides us through the season of change.  A few early storms have the rivers on the rise and cold nights are lowering water temperatures signaling sleepy time for the coastal cutthroats.  It’s hard to pass up the few last sunny days of easy trout fishing for the steelheading work of Winter.

A taste of days to come…