Doug Rose Flyfishing

Coho fishing was great earlier in the week but slowed down by Thursday. After a wild night of wind and rain, you can forget about the West End rivers for a while. The Hoh was running at 16,000 cfs this morning, the Calawah was above 10,000, and the Sol Duc was around 7,500. The Queets was pushing 40,000. As I said a couple weeks ago, go duck hunting. There are lots of birds migrating down the coast right now, and they move into more protected water during storms.

Speaking of duck hunting, I think I’ll be Grover Cleveland for Halloween. He fell out of boat while duck hunting in South Carolina one time, and the Secret Service had a hell of time getting him back in the boat. He also took a fly rod on his honeymoon! He was middle-aged at the time and his bride was several decades younger. I guess you call that real dedication to fishing. Or perhaps really twisted priorities.

I got back last night from a talk for the Central Oregon Fly Fishers in Bend. They are a great group and I had a good time. But I was tired from the drive when I got home, and I also had some fresh oysters and smoked salmon from Hama Hama Seafood. So I skipped my Thursday post.  

The rivers came down nicely earlier in the week, and fly fishers did very well on coho and sea-run cutthroat. Despite that, I predictably spent the day before heading south trying to hook up with a fall steelhead. I hiked into a spot that’s about a half-mile from the road and that requires about a 20 foot drop down to the river. The narrow pool and long run, with river-carved bedrock shelves, are worth the effort. That’s especially true if you want to be alone and avoid the salmon crush on the lower rivers. The river was 48 degrees and as clear as it gets. I fished a Royal Coachman bucktail on a sink-tip. I got one slow pull and that was it. October caddis are still around after the heavy rains last week. I think I may have done better if I’d stayed later, but it’s not the kind of place I want to scramble out of in the dark. I did find a hatful of fat chanterelles.

It’s raining now, very hard, with wind. I’m going out in a while, this time with the 5-weight for cutts. We’ll see how the rising water affects the fishing.

It rained hard all night and still is, so you can scratch the Quillayute Rivers as well as the Hoh this weekend, at least for fly fishing. The Calawah is running around 2,000 now, up from 75 cfs on Tuesday. The Sol Duc is around 1,900, 1,800 cfs higher than it was earlier in the week. And the Hoh? Well, it is edging 10,000 this morning. When I got my steelhead earlier in the week it was well below 1,000. Go hunt ducks! 

Well, I hope you have all been enjoying the afternoon October caddis egg laying flights and bright salmon in the rivers. I haven’t posted in a few weeks. I’ve been working on my duck book and doing a lot of fishing and guiding. In addition, I didn’t want to bury my Fall Newsletter and essays, which I feel happens when I write a bunch of fishing reports right after I publish the newsletter. Anyway, I’m back and will begin posting ”On the Water Log” blogs again each Thursday, or even more frequently.  

Fishing on the West End of the Olympic Peninsula has been up and down this fall. The rivers were all absurdly low until this week. That made fishing tough, especially when combined with east winds and bright skies. Sea-run cutthroat fishing, in particular, has been spottier than usual on the Quillayute System rivers. With the low water, the Hoh has been the most dependable destination in recent weeks. Fly fishers have taken coho, sea-runs and steelhead but you had to be either lucky or work hard for them.

I fished the upper Hoh Monday, before the rain. Dick Wentworth, Syd Glasso’s great friend and protege, had tied a couple of beautiful Steelhead Bees for me, and I wanted to fish them before the big rains hit. Sparse and perfectly proportioned, they floated and waked perfectly, but I didn’t get a bump. The river was very low and it had fallen from 54 degrees to 48 in a week. It just felt dead up there.

Things were very different after a couple days of rain. The Hoh came up nicely but it was still comparatively low and clear. I got about an 18-inch coho jack and similarly-sized bull trout on the lower river shortly after daybreak. They both hit a small black Comet, stripped on a Type 3 sink-tip. The parade of boats arrived a few minutes later, and I beat it to the upper river. I fished all my favorite steelhead drifts over the next several hours without even a juvenile fish. Then, just before I had to leave, I got a really nice wild buck, about 10 pounds. It was colored up beautifully, with lipstick-smudge gill plates and sides. By then, I had switched to a Royal Coachman bucktail, one with the gray body that Glasso recommended.

We’ve had even more rain since then, and the Hoh may be out. I drove out to Lyendecker today, though, and the Sol Duc and Bogachiel are still fishable. Indeed, there were more trailers parked there than I’ve seen since last winter.