Doug Rose Flyfishing

Well, we’ve had our first taste of winter on the Queets. It dropped down into the 20s the last few mornings, and there has been heavy frost on the ground and ice on the windshields. I fished the Salmon and Queets for a little while yesterday morning. I was thinking about coho. There were quite a few vehicles at the park bridge, but I didn’t see anyone with fish, nor did I catch anything. I hearfd that some salmon were caught at the mouth of the Salmon, but that’ too crowded for me. Overall, salmon fishing for has been slow on the Queets and Salmon so far, although the Queets has kicked out a few Chinoo. The Salmon was very clear and cold, about 43 degrees. The Queets wasn’t much warmer, and there was only about a foot-and-a-half of visibility. I like it cleaner than that for fly fishing, so I didn’t spend much time. It should  drop into a nice green shade over the next couple of dry days.

Silver and Chinook fishing hasn’t been that great in the Quillayute System rivers and Hoh yet either. The Hoh was still a little gray on Thursday, but I imagine the upper river was fishable, and I’m sure there is an armada of drift boats on the lower river this weekend. I talked to Waters West’s Dave Steinbaugh the other day about summer-runs, and he said there were still a few in the Bogachiel and Calawah. However, the time for dry lines is probably through. You’ll have you best chance with sink-tips.

Cutthroat are really the most dependable fish right now, although the sea-runs in some of the major West End river may have drifted higher into the watersheds. The Hoko, Goodman Creek, Dickey, Clearwater and Humptulips are all worth a trip. This is also one of my favorite times of year to fish for cutts in saltwater on the East Side of the peninsula, at Admiralty Inlet, Oak Bay and northern Hood Canal. I always make a final pilgramage to a beaver time in late October, as well. Beaver pond cutthroat and brookies are at the most prime–and staggeringly gorgeous–in late autumn.

The Middle Elwha

There are only a few days left to fish the half dozen of so miles of the Elwha River between Lake Aldwell and the Glines Canyon Dam. Many other fisheries compete with the middle Elwha this time of year, but it is a long time between now and the June opener. And as we saw this summer, the beginning of dependable fly fishing doesn’t usually begin until a month or so after the opening day. That makes the decision of where to fish these last few days easy for fly fishers who want a chance at the Olympic Peninsula’s best best rainbow trout fishing.

Things are a little different on the Elwha during the late season. Fewer insects are around, and you see a lot less surface activity from the fish. The series of big storms have brought the river up and down, changing the feel of the river, making less productive. The water is also colder, which slows the rainbows’ metabolism. You still see Blue-winged olives and small caddis and stoneflies. There could also still be a few October Caddis around during the afternoon if the cold didn’t finish them off for the year. But streamers, Woolly Buggers and sculpins are often the most productive flies now.

My fishing partner, Ron Hirschi, and I spent a day on the middle river during the last week of the season last year. The Elwha was extremely low and warm then. Nonetheless, Ron caught a chunky 16-incher from the upper end of the Trestle Hole. He was fishing the seam of soft water across the main current, just below the big rocks. He cast slightly upstream, then mended hard. The dry fly he was using only had a dead drift of about 18 inches before the current yanked it into the boiling fast water. That was enough to fool a very nice fish.

Ron caught it on a pattern of his own design, the Lily’s Elwha Caddis. It is an emerger, with a greenish thorax and brown buffalo dubbing and trailing shuck. Ron collects the buffalo from trees that the animals have rubbed in the Madison Valley. Although he is an Olympic Peninsula native–and superb sea-run cutthroat and coho anglers–Ron lived in Montana for six years.  The green on the fly suggests the Rhyacophilla caddis, the Green Rock Worm. The name ”Lily” is a reference to my yellow Lab.

A few weeks ago, Curt Reed and I did an introductory fly fishing clinic for Waters West. As always, we concluded with line handling and presentation practice on the Elwha. While I was waiting for everyone to get into their waders, I noticed a a large mayfly hovering over the water. Frankly, I couldn’t think what it could be. Elwha Green Drakes hatch during the summer, not fall. Not long after that, Curt showed me an  insect he had captured. It, too, was large and looked like a Green Drake. A few days later I ran into a nice emergence of the same insect on the upper Sol Duc. I checked my books when I got home and discovered they were probably Slate Winged Olives, a mayfly that is in the same genus as the Western Green Drake (drunella) but is a hair smaller. They apparently hatch through September in coastal areas.

When I first began fishing the Elwha 25 years ago, you could use any type of bait or lure you wanted and could kill fish. The fishing wasn’t particularly good, however, and a stream survey revealed that the average angler caught less than 1 fish per outing. The rainbows weren’t very big back then either, most between 8 and 10 inches. Then, at the urging of local anglers, Olympic National Park and the state changed the regulations to a 12 inch minimum and banned bait. Eventually, the park implemented catch-and-release. Since then, the number of fish has increased substantially, and anglers now routinely take trout over 12 inches. The middle and upper river now also turn out fair numbers of fish over 15 inches. I think that says pretty much all you need to about the efficacy of catch-and-release regulations for resident trout in rivers like the Elwha that have low natural productivity.

Finally, there seems to be a lot of confusion about when the two Elwha dams will be removed and what the fishing opportunities will be afterward. Until recently, the dams were scheduled to begin coming down in 2009 (from a previous 2008 target). However, the park announced earlier this year that the date has been postponed until at least 2012. Apparently, bidding and the construction of a water treatment plant for Elwha River water users is taking longer than projected. As for fishing, there will be none for five years after dam removal begins. I was told that by Sam Brenkman, ONP’s fish biologist. The moratorium is go give fish time to re-colonize the middle and upper watershed. I asked Sam if it will be possible to, say, hike up the North Fork Quinault or Dosewallips trails and fish the backcountry Elwha during the closure. The answer is NO.

The blog didn’t appear on Thursday because of no power here on the coast, and I haven’t been around a computer since then until today. As of Wednesday, the day I wrote the blog, most of the glacial rivers were murky but the Sol Duc and Humptulips were fishable. It has been raining like crazy the last four days, however, and I wouldn’t count on good conditions out here until at least mid-week.

COHO-COHO-COHO 

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that hatchery summer steelhead had been scarce on the Sol Duc this fall. Naturally, I  ran into Jim Kerr in the Thriftway in Forks a couple of days later, and he told me that he had taken some large fish from the river and that a lot had shown up at the hatchery. It has been raining steadily since then, however, and I imagine the summer steelhead season is just about over. Fall coho will provide the bulk of the action on the Sol Duc and other Quillayute System rivers from now through November. They are legal on the Sol Duc from the hatchery at Sappho downstream and below Highway 101 on the Bogachiel and Calawah. Selective gear regulations have been implemented through October on all three rivers, and you must release all wild Coho. Wild coho may be retained in November. Last year at this time, after one of the driest summer/falls on record, the Sol Duc was still very low. Most of the coho hadn’t even appeared yet, but there are plenty of silvers around this year. I had good luck with sea-run cutthroat last year in pools in late October, but this has, been a high water year–and it’s still raining–and the cutts are much more spread out. You will find them in all sorts of water, and you just have to hunt for them and keep moving. 

The Humptulips was in fine shape on Tuesday and I heard quite a few coho were taken during the middle of the week. However, I rode over it yesterday afternoon, and it was high, muddy and unfishable, at least with flies. Most coho are taken from the Stevens Creek Hatchery downstream. But there is a lot of nice cutthroat water between the Highway 101 bridge and the hatchery. Humptulips wild coho are in pretty good shape. Indeed, they are characterized as a “healthy” stock and spawn in more than 60 tributaries. Many of the wild fish return late, as late as December, but you always have a chance of connecting with a silver when you’re stripping a cutthroat fly this time of year. The WDFW stopped releasing summer steelhead smolts into the Humputulips system a few years ago, to protect the river’s declining wild run. The Humptulips’ east and west forks drain a vast area east of Highway 101, and you have a shot at cutthroat in them as they drop and clear after the recent rain. Access isn’t particularly easy, but the Donkey Creek Road, which extends all the way to Wynoochee Lake, crosses both forks.

The Dungeness River opened for coho on the 16th and the lower Elwha has been open since October 1. Both rivers have substantial runs of hatchery fish, although the Dungeness’ is larger, and anglers have taken as many as 4,000 fish some years. They receive a lot of fishing pressure, the vast majority from non-fly-fishers. All of the coho fishing in the Elwha is in the 4.9 miles of water below the Elwha Dam, much of it in inaccessible canyon. Moreover, the old one lane bridge over the Elwha is being removed, and the last I heard you couldn’t reach the fishing access at the WDFW’s Elwha Spawning Channel. That will concentrate people even more near the mouth. Dungeness coho can be caught from tidewater all the way upstream to the hatchery, more than 11 miles. But the good holding water is all well known, and don’t expect anyone to cut you any slack because you’re a fly fisher and need more room. I haven’t fished either of these rivers in October for years.

LAST CALL ON THE BIG LAKES

Although many Olympic Peninsula low elevation lakes remain open year-round, the region’s three largest–Ozette, Crescent and Quinault–all close in late October.

Lake Ozette is the third largerst natural lake in Washington. It contains everything from sockeye salmon to migrating steelhead, but the best fly fishing is for coastal cutthroat. Ozette cutts enter the lake from the Ozette River, which flows into the Pacific Ocean a couple miles north of Cape Alava. They spawn in a number of tributaries to the lake, especially Big Creek. The lake probably also contains adfluvial cutthroat–that is, fish that spawn in moving water but spend the bulk of their adult feeding years in the lake. Recent research has shown that Ozette cutthroat prey heavily on sockeye fry and fingerling during spring and early summer. This time of year your best bets are sculpin patterns and terrestrials. Lake Ozette gets very windy and is no place for float tubes or rafts.

Fjiord-like, 9-mile-long Lake Crescent doesn’t produce a lot of trout, but the ones it does are nice fish and they are unique. The lake’s Beardslee rainbow and crescenti cutthroat are descended from steelhead and sea-run cutthroat trapped in the lake by an immense landslide thousands of years ago. There isn’t much spawning or juvenile rearing water, so each year-class of trout is small. Once the fish reach 14 inches or so, they begin to feed on the lake’s abundant population of kokanee salmon (sockeye that were also trapped in the lake). There are documented records of 20 pound Beardslees (16 pound current record) and 12 pound crescentis. You aren’t likely to catch anything that big on a fly rod. But large fish do feed closer to the surface as the water cools in autumn. A large peacock Zonker type streamer stripped over a drop off or shoal could produce a real jolt. If you want faster action–or don’t have a boat–fish the creek mouths with smaller streamers and wet flies. You don’t need a license to fish Lake Crescent, but it is catch-and-release and flies must be single hook and barbless. You may be checked.

Lake Quinault is managed by the Quinault Indian Nation, and you must buy a tribal permit to fish it. They are available at the Lake Quinault Mercantile and Amanda Park Mercantile. The lake is famous for its sockeye, but salmon are off limits to non-tribal anglers. Rainbow and cutthroat are the principle sport fish, and they can reach several pounds. Bull trout are also legal to take in Lake Quinault. Most sport anglers troll, often with pop gear. But the lake is full of migrating and juvenile salmon and trout, and streamers and bucktails will take fish. The Forest Service operates three campgrounds on the south shore, but only the Willaby Creek Campground is open this time of year. It has a boat launch. The lake closes on October 28 this year.

Fly fishing conditions and opportunities on the Olympic Peninsula this week haven’t really changed that much from last week. Forks has had 4.8 inches of rain since the 1st, including 1.25 on Tuesday and 2.25 on Sunday. So I really don’t have much ”on the water” time to report on.

Indeed, just as the rivers began dropping into shape last Saturday, it began to rain again. Everything is dropping into shape nicely now, but the rivers will be colored up and your best bets will be on the Quillayute System, for coho, steelhead and cutts, for Elwha rainbows,and for sea-runs on the creeks. Or as I wrote last week, fish the rainshadow beaches for saltwater cutthroat. Or go hunting, which makes the most sense, with deer and ducks opening this weekend.

There is a cutthroat creek I really wish I could fish this week, one that has been my favorite for two decades and which will probably be in great shape this weekend. But it has been altered beyond recognition, and I can’t bear to fish it anymore.

I discovered it in the early 1980s. I had heard that it contained beaver ponds, and I was something of a beaver pond fanatic back then. Unlike most beaver ponds that I fished, this creek’s dams were on the lower river, within a quarter mile of Hood Canal. A big flood tide would reverse its flow for a couple of hours. The largest beaver dam was near the upper reach of a big spring tide, and I soon discovered that I could take not only “resident” fish above the dams but also sea-bright anadromous fish.

Back then, the creek was essentially invisible. It flowed through three culverts beneath a county road, and Nootka rose, hard hack and alders  screened it from view.  Unless you knew about it, you would never suspect the creek was there, let alone that it provided good fishing. You also had to be willing to to buck brush and berries, wade sticky intertidal muck and avoid the beaver holes along the bank. Only a few locals bothered.

For a long time, the most substantial beaver dam was located near the upper reach of the tide. If you have never seen intertidal beaver dams, they are different from the classic forest structures. They are much lower, usually only a foot or so above the high water level. I’ve subsequently learned that this allows water to flow both ways more effectively, which lets them cope with both stream flow and upstream tides. They are called “low head” dams.    

I would hike into the dam on frosty October mornings, cracking fresh panes of ice on the creekside mud with my boots. If it was a low tide, it would usually be slow fishing at first. I would take a couple of fish in the deep hole just above the dam. But then the fishing would slow until the sun got up over the alders that bordered the east bank. For some reason, the sunlight would turn the fish on, and I would take a number of  cutthroat from 10 to 14 inches.

I don’t know if these fish were truly “resident” cutthroat or anadromous fish that had simply returned early and were now acting like freshwater cutthroat. I imagine they were largely sea-runs, because the creek is awfully low and warm during the height of summer. However, they responded like resident fish, and I took most of them on nymphs and small wet flies that imitated insects. My two best flies were a Gold-ribbed Hare’s Ear and a Zug Bug, both in size 14.

I didn’t really think about it much back then, but I now believe the trout took the GRHE for Blue-winged olive emergers. In October, they and midges were about the only bugs you see over the creek. The most effective presentation was to cast near rising fish or to the deep buckets and beging stripping the fly as soon as it hit the water. On a low tide, I would catch 90 percent of the fish  in the 60 foot reach immediately upstream of the dam.

Everything would change when the tide pushed up over the dam. I would begin to see slashing fish and the flash and vees of large trout moving through the water. As the salt water overtook the fresh, the fish would stop rising–presumably because the insect quit hatching in the tidal water. The nymphs didn’t work as well now. I would switch to traditional cutthroat patterns, to Spruce flies and Knutson Spiders and Carey Specials. 

If high tide had been early in the morning, before daybreak, I would find sea-runs all the way from the road upstream above the dam to the oxbow where the creek disappeared into unwadable and impenetrable mash

These fish were much brighter than the “residents,” and they seldom had red throat slashes. Their sides were pewter or quicksilver, and they had tarnished green backs and lovely lavender gill plates. They were basically the same size as the freshwater fish, but my largest fish each year, fish 16, 17 or 18 inches, were late October sea-runs.

I would take the sea-runs all over the creek, in the flats on the bends, from deep beaver channels and cuttbanks, and up against the mouths of feeder creeks. I caught every one on a stripped fly, retrieved fairly briskly against the flow of the current or tide. They frequently moved a considerable distance to intercept the fly.

I never used to catch salmon in the creek. It closes at the end of October, like most creeks, and its wild stock of coho didn’t enter freshwater until later in November. However, a half-dozen years ago I began to connect with bright coho in mid- to late October, both jacks and adults. I talked to a few people about it, and it seems they are hatchery fish, which began to survive at higher rates after ocean conditions improved in the late 1990s. Apparently, their homing instincts aren’t as refined as wild fish, and significant numbers enter any hospitable-looking stream when the spawning urge strikes.

It isn’t legal to target them, but they frequently hit my small cutthroat dressings. An 8-pound coho fresh from tidewater on a 5-weight and size 10 soft hackle in a river dominated by snags, tules and weeds is something you don’t soon forget.

Sometimes it seems that the most profound lesson of spending a lifetime hunting and fishing is learning to adjust to seeing the places and creatures you love slowly disappearing before your eyes and being comepletely unable to do anything about it.

A few years ago, the salmon restoration folks decided to “fix” the creek. They claimed the culverts under the road were a barrier to fish passage and impeded the flow of tidewater into the watershed above the road. That wasn’t true. Indeed, coho and cutthroat not only migrate above the culverts–they also swim through and spawn above a second set of culverts a half-mile upstream.

 My good friend, Ron Hirshci, a fisheries biologists and life long resident of the area, told them that. Indeed, he was doing research on juvenile salmon migration at the time and routinely seined the creek above the culvert. Besides, coho and cutts, he found juvenile chum, steelhead and Chinook that swam up from the canal and used the large pool behind the culverts as refugia. He even found juvenile flounder above the road–a species not heretofore noted for their skill at negotiating fish passage barriers.

However, “tidal prisms” and “connectivity” are currently the rage within the salmon restoration community. Despite Ron’s urgent arguments that the creek was historically a beaver-dam-dominated system–characterized by a lot of instream structure and meanders, cuttbanks and flats–and that the culverts simply functioned as a man-made beaver dam, were utterly ignored. So was his request that the local and regional biologists who believed in the project at least walk the creek with him and look at it from the perspective of someone had had observed it for a half century.

So they removed the culverts and spent more than $600,000 building the bridge. Cutthroat and coho still migrate above the road, perhaps even more easily. There is a lot more tidal flow. It surges upstream, depositing snags outside the channel, and covering the old otter landings and beaver runs with intertidal ooze and detritus. The creek runs much faster at low tide now, like the “normal” creek they wanted to create, but it is more channelized and there is much less area for cutthroat to hold. The pool just above the road, where juvenile and adult fish lingered to adjust to their surroundings, is gone. 

Indeed, the creek that Ron and I loved is gone forever.

I’m sure the people who planned and executed the project are happy with the results. No doubt, they gave each other high praise and, probably, awards, at the banquets they seem so fond of attending. The creek, after all, looks and  functions now just like the textbooks and experts say it should.

But that is clearly the problem. Not all rivers and creeks are the same. And only a jackass would think there is some sort of template that you can haul from system to system to restore fish runs. 

I got skunked on the creek last October, on my traditional “last day of the season” trip. It was the first time it had happened in more than 20 years. But I didn’t fish very long or try very hard. My heart just wasn’t in it.

You see, in addition to destroying my favorite cutthroat creek, the restoration folks also hung a “fish here” sign on it. All of the vegetation that had obscured the creek from the road was removed during construction of the bridge. The creek is now visible–and tempting–at 50 miles an hour. Not surprisingly, the banks are now littered with worm tubs and salmon egg jars, monofilament tangles, and Rooster Tail packaging. A lot of fly fishers also fish the creek now.

With the easy access and visibility now, it’s hard to imagine that poachers don’t also visit the creek when the wild coho show up in November.

“So what are you going to do if you spend more than a half-million dollars and beavers build a new dam just upstream of the bridge,” I asked on of the restoration managers once. “Are you going to blow it up so the river looks the way you think it should.”

He talked for a quite a while. Guys that do this sort of thing for a living are good at talking and that’s what they get paid for. But he never answered my question.

Come on beavers!

I  

The blog for this week, October 4, 2007, ended up in the uncategorized column this week. I have no idea why, but you can read it there. Doug

                                AFTER THE DELUGE

I was on the lower Calawah last Saturday morning when the big storm blew in. The tops of the Sitka spruce began to sway and big-leaf maple leaves began drifting down. Then it began to rain. It rained more or less consistently through Saturday, Sunday and Monday, and it has been intermittent since then. Naturally, the rain forest rivers took the brunt of it, and they are dirty and high. The Hoh is normally about 900 cfs this time of year, and it was 2,200 this morning. The Queets rose from around 500 cfs last week to over 14,000 and is now around 5,000. I live about a mile as the crow flies from the Queets, and I could hear the river Wednesday morning. It sounded like distant jet planes but it never stopped.

The ground was so dry before the storm–despite a few decent rains in late September–that the soil absorbed a lot of the precipitation. As a result, even the rain forest rivers will probably be in fishable condition sooner than you would think. As for the Quillayute Rivers, the upper Sol Duc was high but clear enough to fish Wednesday, and the Calawah and Bogachiel will be colored up and with lots of leaves and branches but most likely fishable this weekend. The creeks are also dropping nicely into shape, and I have seen cars at the Salmon River this week. As for the Elwha, it is almost back to normal.

It has been a tough week for river fishing, but you can nearly always find some sort of saltwater fishing on the Olympic Peninsula when the rivers are blown out. This is especially true during October, when late coho, early chum and, of course, sea-run cutthroat are available in nearshore marine waters. Sea-runs are my favorite, and the eastern Strait of Juan de Fuca, Admiralty Inlet and Hood Canal beaches can provide terrific fall cutthroat fly fishing.

By tradition, most cutthroat fly fishers shift their focus from saltwater to rivers in September. That is a good strategy on the coast and on the large northern Puget Sound rivers. But cutthroat native to the streams of the northeast Olympic Peninsula rain shadow tend to remain in marine waters well into autumn, often into winter. In part, this is a reflection of the very low flows many of the creeks have during fall. But  the fish also have more food in the salt than the creeks and the protected bays and inlets aren’t as difficult for fish during autumn as coastal waters. Cutthroat are available year-round in some protected bays.

Cutthroat fly fishing is a little different in autumn than during spring and summer. Although the waves and wind and rain aren’t as strong as on the coast, they aren’t uncommon. As a result, I use floating lines and flies less and fish deep, beneath the waves. My favorite lines are my Cortland Camo, 10- and 15-foot sink-tips and full length sinking lines. I know a lot of saltwater fly fishers shrink from full sinking lines, but I take some nice cutts with them

There’s a lot of water to choose from. From Dungeness Bay east through Sequim and Discovery bays and from Port Townsend and Oak bays down through Dabob Bay and the estuaries of the Big Quilcene, Dosewallips, Duckabush and Hamma Hamma rivers each contain an abundance of cutthroat habitat. These waters are also leeward of the coastal storms and you can usually get out on the water. There is less kelp and other floating vegetation than to the west, making fishing much easier and more pleasant. The shoreline is more broken up than the coast, punctuated by pocket coves, lagoons, spits, oyster bars and creek mouths. Boat ramps are conveniently located, and there is much more beach access at state and county parks than in Puget Sound.

Not all of the beaches are equally productive. You can fish for a long time in Dungeness Bay without connecting with a cutthroat. For some reason, the Dungeness River, like the Elwha to the west, has never been as productive of a cutthroat stream as the West End or Hood Canal rivers. In fact, I imagine most of the cutthroat taken in Dungeness Bay are from the small independent creeks that drain into the bay. This pattern seems to hold all through the northeastern Olympics. Beaches near creeks are often more productive than the deltas of the large rivers. The best fishing often occurs in places where several creeks flow into tidewater within a few miles of each other.

I fish differently during October and early November than I do during summer and early autumn. Although the rain shadow beaches don’t get the waves and rain and wind that coast does, you still frequently have to cope with lumpy water. I fish floating lines and flies less often and concentrate on getting my fly down beneath the waves. I like Cortland Camos, 10 to 15 foot sink tips and even full sinking lines this time of year. I know a lot of saltwater fly fishers shrink from sinking lines, but they will often get you very nice cutts when no one else is catching anything.

Two of my favorite flies for this time of year are my friend Jeffrey Delia’s Delia’s Conehead Squid and my Zostera. Jeff is a long-time Hood Canal saltwater fly fisher, as well as an oysterman and photographer. The Conehead Squid is the most productive saltwater cutthroat pattern I know. It is basically a white Woolly Bugger without a hackle. It is available at Waters West in Port Angeles. 

My Zostera is a simple dressing. I tie it on a Daiichi 2546 in sized 6 and 8. It has a Gliss’n Glo Mother of Pearl tail (root beer), a pearl body braid body, a dark olive Icelandic Sheephair wing and red thread head. I call it Zostera, the taxonomic name for eelgrass, because it works best when fished along the edges of eelgrass beds. I don’t have a clue what fish think it is, but it works best in fall and on a sink tip line.