Doug Rose Flyfishing

Chris’s Great Bottomfishing Video

I’m still working on the trout cookery post. In the meantime, I know you’ll enjoy my friend, Chris Bellows’s, great video  at flyyakker.blogspot  on bottomfishing in the western Strait of Juan de Fuca. On Saturday, as we drove home from Chimacum, Eliana and I must have passed 100 big power boats heading east after halibut fishing. None of those folks could possibly have experienced the marine environment anywhere near as intimately as Chris did in his kayak. I used to be the naturalist for kayak tours of Dungeness Spit for the Olympic Park Institute, and seeing the rise and fall of Chris’s kayak made me really want to get back on the saltwater in a human-powered boat. I even liked the music on the video–it really swung, not in the fly fishing sense, but in the way Duke Ellington meant it. That’s really really rare in the musical desert of muzaky bluegrass and honky metal on most fly fishing videos. Chris is charting new territory as a writer and fly fisherman on the Olympic Peninsula. He has a great future.

CONGRATULATIONS PRESTON!

I just found out that my friend and fellow coastal cutthroat aficionado, Preston Singletary, won the Federation of Fly Fishers Washington State Council’s Fly Tying Hall of Fame Award. That’s a real achievement, and it couldn’t have gone to a more deserving tyer. Not only is Preston a marvelous fly tyer, he is also a living compendium of Pacific Northwest fly tying history and lore.

Here are links to four pieces Preston has contributed to my annual Christmas Newsletter. Each examines a different facet of fly tying in our region. If you haven’t read them, I know you will find them informative and compellingly written. And if you have read them, they are definitely worth taking a second look at, because there is always something new to learn from Preston–and his flies are beautiful. The piece from 2010 on callibaetis is especially timely this time of year for trout fishers.

The links will take you to the appropriate newsletter. Then scroll down until you find Preston’s piece.

“The End of Autumn”–2008

www.dougroseflyfishing.com/blog/?p=95#more-95

“Cutthroat Creek”–2009

www.dougroseflyfishing.com/blog/p=168#more 168

“Callibaetis Days”–2010

www.dougroseflyfishiing.com/blog/?p=228#more-228

“A Few Simple and Classic Northwest Steelhead Flies”–2011

www.dougroseflyfishing.com/blog/?p=525#more-525

The Hoh Does it Again

Well, I guess I won’t be fishing the Hoh on the opener tomorrow. Ruby and I hiked around the upper river on Thursday, and it was clear and still dropping, about 2,100 cfs. I had high hopes that I would get a shot at an early summer steelhead this week. Eliana and Ruby and I went down there again Sunday, and it was on the way up from the low on Friday, and it had snow water in it. I was still guardedly optimistic. But the last two days of sun and warm temperatures have kicked the flow up above 2,800, and I’m sure the water’s pretty cloudy by now. The river has also begun that summer time “tidal” flow regime–rising and falling daily as the run-off swells the flow, then subsides. Some gear and bait guys will no doubt fish tomorrow, even some fly fishers, perhaps, but it won’t be what I had in mind.

CARPENTER ANT TIME!

One just flew in the front door. I needn’t say more, do I? Well, maybe this: you don’t have to fish ant patterns just on lakes. Don Kaas told me once that he watched Jim Garrett land a nice summer steelhead on the upper Sol Duc with a black ant pattern when they were on the wing. The fish actually moved several feet to the fly. Come to think of it, Don gave me an ant pattern tied by Garrett that I still have. And an oysterman I know told me that when you could still kill cutthroat in Hood Canal, he would catch fish that were so full of carpenter ants in spring that their bellies were distended. They were feeding on ants blown onto the salt from the snags up on the ridges, apparently. If you know a good undeveloped beach, one that still has a lot of old timber above it, I would give it serious thought this week. I’m going to see if Dick Wentworth wants to go for a drive and Jeff Delia has some free time.

My First Trout and My Mom

I’m working on a piece about cooking trout for tomorrow or Tuesday. But today’s Mother’s Day, and that got me thinking about the first trout that I ever caught. My mother cooked it for me and my brother and our friend, Steve Mortz. It happened more than 50 years ago.

I was extraordinarily lucky and grew up within walking distance of two trout ponds. They were less than a mile from our house, across the county road, over a rolling pasture that usually had Holsteins, around the edge of a swampy creek bottom, and then up and over a railroad embankment.

I don’t know exactly how old I was, certainly less than 10. We all had cane poles then, with old-style cork bobbers and cotton line, and we carried a coffee can of worms that we had dug in the heavy loam behind our house.

We fished the larger pond of the two ponds. It had a dock. We basically just sat on the dock and watched our red and yellow bobbers and talked.
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Not much of a post today. We drove over to Chimacum and looked for a place, and that took the whole day. If everything works out, we’ll get it and be moved in just in time for the Marine Area 9 salmon opener. Meanwhile, the Hoh opens next week, and I’ll be fishing it and the Sol Duc for steelhead through the end of the month. That is, when I’m not on a lake or wading the surf for red-tails or fishing the east side salt for cutthroat. But I want to connect with as many summer-runs as I can between now and the end of June. This is a great time of year!

I wrote a piece about Van Egan when he passed away two years ago, but here is a link to his good friend, Art Lingren’s, remembrance of him from the British Columbia Federation of Fly Fisherman’s great newsletter Fly Lines:

www.bcfff.bc.ca/newsletter/FlyLines.V10N2.pdf

As always, there’s a lot of other great stuff in the issue.

Weird Weather, a Beautiful Boat, and a Really Cool Cutthroat . . .  continued

photo by David Christian

Boy, I really love cutthroat trout. All salmonids are magnificent fish, and each species displays a range of life histories, size ranges and, at times, strikingly different appearances. But none come close to the diversity of cutthroat. On the Olympic Peninsula alone, we have the silvery sea-runs of Hood Canal and the dark cutts of the Dickey, 10-plus-pound crescenti cutthroat and 10-inch adults in beaver ponds, yellow-bellied late summer Bogachiel fish and “blue-backs” like the bright 17-incher I caught in the upper Calawah last April.

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Weird Weather, a Beautiful Boat, and a Really Cool Cutthroat

David Christian and I fished Lake Pleasant from his wooden boat, Sea-Run, which he built, for a few hours today. I got a really nice 16- or 17-inch cutthroat and lost a smaller fish at the boat. It was tough fishing, with one small squall after another bringing rain and wind and hail. In my experience, trout don’t bite well when the barometer is going crazy, and we only saw one riser and virtually no bugs. But it was a lot of fun. I’ll post a full report tomorrow with pictures.

The New West End Creek Closures

A very good friend of mine loves to fish the tributary creeks to the larger West End rivers in summer for cutthroat. Or, rather, he liked to, past tense. According to the 2012 Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife regulations pamphlet, his four favorite creeks are all now closed to fishing.

If he fished the creeks that drain into Lake Ozette or the larger Lake Ozette tributaries rather than Quillayute System tribs, he would still be able to fish for his cutthroat. He would still be able to kill them, even. I can still fish most of the Hood Canal creeks and beaver ponds that I have fished for years–although they are now managed as catch-and-release.

I understand the rationale of closing tributaries and creeks to protect juvenile salmonids. It makes a lot of sense when the stocks are imperiled. And I am sure there is an explanation for why some creeks remain open under the new regulations, while others are permanently closed. But the WDFW pamphlet didn’t explain the process and criteria by which creeks are closed. Asa result, the closures seem almost arbitrary.
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