Doug Rose Flyfishing

There’s a picture in my first book, Fly Fishing the Olympic Peninsula, that shows me kneeling beside river-carved rocks on the Hoh River holding a nice summer steelhead. The cut line for the photo reads: “The author took this ‘dip-in’ hatchery summer steelhead from a rain forest river.  Note he wears hiking boots rather than waders.” In my most recent book, Fly-Fishing Guide to the Olympic Peninsula,” the chapter on fishing the Elwha River backcountry opens with a shot of a much younger and thinner version of me casting from river rocks in hiking boots. The chapter immediately preceding it, “Mildred Lakes,” has a photo of me fishing from shore, with the ragged spires of the Sawtooth Range, the boundary between the Mount Skokomish Wilderness Area and Olympic National Park, in the distance. You can see the tops of my hiking boots in that photo, as well.

Hiking boots aren’t considered essential gear by many fly fishers. And if you spend most of your time fishing from boats or along saltwater beaches, you probably don’t spend a lot of time in boots. But the Olympic Peninsula contains nearly 900 miles of maintained hiking trails, the majority of which lead to mountains lakes or streams. Moreover, private timberlands encompass vast swaths of the peninsula’s low and mid-level elevations,  virtually all of it honeycombed by logging roads. Many of these roads have been gated in recent years to prevent timber theft, dumping and vandalism. The only way to reach the steelhead rivers, kettle lakes, and beaver ponds behind the gates is to hike. (more…)

The rivers that drain the western flanks of the Olympic Peninsula host, arguably, the last stronghold of large wild winter steelhead in the lower 48 states. That’s why anglers from around the nation and around the globe travel to the Hoh and Queets and Quinault, the Bogachiel, Sol Duc and Calawah each spring. Over the last year or so, I have guided folks from New York and Texas, Virginia and Montana, Massachusetts and California–not to mention Japan and Europe. A trip to these fabled rain forest rivers is a grand adventure, and taking one of their large anadromous rainbows on a fly is a heady challenge.

For my part, I live five minutes from a trail down to the Calawah. The Bogachiel is about a 10 minute drive from my house, and the lower Sol Duc is 15 minutes away. I can get to the Hoh in less than a half hour. These rivers, in other words, are my home waters. 

As hard as it may seem for someone who invests a lot of  dreams, plans and cash to visit these rivers, they aren’t necessarily the places I seek out when I want to get away. Oh sure, I fish these rivers a lot, and they are where you will usually find me on my days off. But when I  want to shake off the familiar and immerse myself in something different, I tend to head for different waters. (more…)

 
Two Wentworth Versions of the Sol Duc

I focused nearly all of my fly tying this winter on Syd Glasso and Dick Wentworth Spey-style dressings. I now have a big old Perrine fly box full of their steelhead flies. It’s got Sol Ducs and Sol Duc Speys and Sol Duc Darks. It also has Orange Herons, Brown Herons, Black Herons and Courtesans. There is a row of Glasso-style Polar Shrimp, with both hackle tip and goose shoulder wings. The box also contains a row of Quillayutes and Mr. Glassos, the Glasso-inspired dressings created by Dick Wentworth, his great friend and protege.

I tied Glasso-style patterns before this winter, but this is the first time I’ve really put a sustained effort into it. I tied nearly every day, and I tied at least one Glasso or Wentworth fly each time I sat down at the vise. With all the high water and blown out rivers we’ve had, I’ve had a lot of time to work on them.

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                           . . . random observations on the many ways to pursue cutthroat on the Olympic Peninsula in autumn.

                          THE SECRET ESTUARY

The Olympic Peninsula is rich with estuaries. They range from sprawling bays such as Dungeness to the snag-strewn coastal pools at Kalaloch. There are low gradient rivers like the Hoquiam, where tidewater pushes far upriver, and tea-colored creeks that corkscrew through salt marsh flats.

My all time favorite estuary is one of the latter. It rises on low forested hills but quickly drops to a virtually impenetrable freshwater marsh. The last half-mile or so sidles through saltmarsh before braiding across oyster bars and driftwood into Hood Canal.

Before the salmon restoration folks replaced three culverts with a $600,000 bridge, you could hardly tell that the creek existed from the road. It flowed, mysteriously and darkly, within earshot of 18 wheelers and SUVs. It was a virtual refugia for cutthroat and coho, little green herons and green-winged teal, otters and mink, even a bear. It was a secret estuary.  (more…)

When I first began fishing for summer steelhead on Olympic Peninsula rivers in the 1980s, I fished with what was considered standard summer steelhead gear in those days–a nine foot 8-weight rod, a floating line and a 12-foot Type 3 sink-tip, and ”classic” Pacific Northwest wet flies like Green-Butt Skunks, Purple Perils and Skykomish Sunrises. My presentation was the same whether I fished the floater or my sink-tip. I cast downstream at a roughly 45 degree angle, mended the line, and swung the fly across the face of the current. 

I caught fish then, and that is still a great way to take summer steelhead. It is especially effective during the early season on the Sol Duc and Calawah and Bogachiel, when the water is cold and high from run-off. It is productive on the Hoh throughout the summer and fall.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, I began to read and hear about other ways to use a floating line for summer steelhead. In books and articles by Jock Scott, Roderick Haig-Brown and Bill McMillan I read about  “waking” and “skating,” the “riffled hitch,” and ”greased line.”  (more…)

                (with apologies to Wallace Stevens)                       

                                           I

I would jam my wading staff into the black muck and sedges at the edge of the beaver pond in late October. The staff–a worn, gray, five-foot limb with a curve at the top like a shepard’s crook–would ride out the winter there. It would endure everything the Olympic Peninsula winter threw at it–rain squalls from Hood Canal, the high water that overflowed the dam in November and December, hurricane force winds, snow and hard freezes. And for five years, the staff was in the exact same spot I had put it in October when I returned for opening day the following June.

I hadn’t expected to find the staff when I returned that first June. I had forgotten all about it. But there it was, crooked, the color of campfire ash, and only canted slightly out of the vertical position I had left it in seven months before. (more…)

I wrote this sentence in the first chapter of my steelhead book, The Color of Winter–Steelhead Fly Fishing on the Olympic Peninsula.

“I fished the upper portion of one of the peninsula’s most popular rivers once a week a few years ago, and I only ran into one other person, and I knew him.”

That book came out in 2003. I probably wrote the lines in 2000 or 2001, and the year I recalled was in the mid-1990s.

That wasn’t really that long ago, but I don’t have to tell you that the West End rivers have become a lot more crowded since then.  A couple years ago, I spent a weekday morning on that same stretch of water. I saw seven other fisherman, all carrying fly rods. (more…)

        ”Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how.”  Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac. 

The Northwest Watershed Institute (NWI) and other conservation organizations are working to preserve critical fish and wildlife habitat on northern Hood Canal’s Dabob and Tarboo bays.  

The NWI’s long term goal is simple–to protect and restore Tarboo Creek and upper Dabob/Tarboo bays from its headwaters to the estuary. This reflects a philosophy that believes it is both simpler and cheaper to preserve the natural functions of an ecosystem than to allow it to be degraded and then, later,  spend vast sums of money, usually public money, to restore it, nearly always to a much diminished level of productivity.

NWI’s most immediate goal is to secure long-term, comprehensive protection of upper Dabob and Tarboo bays. To that end, it and it’s partners, the Jefferson Land Trust and Nature Conservancy, have proposed that the Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR) expand its current Dabob Bay Natural Area Preserve from 195 to more than 3,500 acres. The DNR’s Natural Heritage Advisory Commitee approved the boundary in June, but the DNR has since reduced the size to accommodate a timber sale. (more…)

         ”I like Spey type flies for winter steelheading and have used them for over twenty years. The style is over a century old, they’re easy to tie and they look seductive in the water. The fish take them solidly and that’s enough for me.”

                                                        Syd Glasso, “The Olympic Peninsula,” published in The Creel, 1970

Syd Glasso, the father of the steelhead Spey fly, died on September 6, 1983.

It is impossible to truly assess the impact that Glasso had on North American fly tying, especially in the Pacific Northwest. Before Glasso adapted the sleek, long-hackled Atlantic salmon flies of Scotland’s Spey River to the winter steelhead of the Olympic Peninsula’s rivers, few North American fly fishers outside of Vancouver Island had even heard of Spey flies. Now, a quarter century after his death, Spey flies have become the subjects of several books, dozens of magazine articles, and scores of dressings with the word “Spey” in their name have been documented in fly tying books and web sites. 

Yet more than 50 years after he took his first winter steelhead with one of his steelhead Speys, the dressings in Glasso’s Sol Duc and Heron series remain the most beautiful, most celebrated, and most effective North American Spey flies. Indeed, his Sol Duc, Sol Duc Spey and Orange Heron are the only Spey-type steelhead flies that the casual steelheader can identify by sight. (more…)

The Olympic Peninsula has more than a dozen major rivers and countless creeks, but the Elwha River provides by far the best fly fishing for resident rainbow trout. Many fly fishers, myself included, believe it offers the finest rainbow fly fishing in western Washington. It is also the best river on the peninsula to “match the hatch”–that is, try to tempt trout with flies that actually imitate what they are eating at the time you’re on the river. 

The Elwha has been written about quite a bit lately, and many anglers from outside the peninsula and newcomers have fished it for the first time in recent years.

Last year, I heard a lot of complaints when the river wasn’t fishable until weeks after the June 1 opener. However, the Elwha is the peninsula’s third largest watershed–and has a significant glacial component to its flow–and it isn’t usually at its best until it drops and clears and warms up a bit. This is typically sometime in mid- to late July. Many of the newer Elwha anglers simply fished it for the first time during the years of light snow packs that preceeded last year, and came to the, reasonable, conclusion that fishing it in June was normal.  (more…)