On the Water Log, December 7, 2009
Well, this is going to be hard to believe, but I got a nice 8 or 9 pound winter steelhead on my first cast last Thursday. My fishing partner, David Christian, and I were on the Salmon River in Olympic National Park. It was the first time I had fished since the big rains knocked out the coho run in November.
So, in other words, I caught a winter steelhead on my first cast of my first trip of the season. I don’t expect that to ever happen again in this lifetime.
I caught it swinging a pink bunny leech across the head of a tight little run. I made a roll cast to cover the water in front of me, and I actually saw the strike at the end of the swing. I was fishing a 10 foot, Type 6 tip on my TFO switch rod.
Catching the fish was great, but it was even more satisfying that it was a wild buck. Wild early-timed fish are rare on Olympic Peninsula rivers these days, especially on heavily planted winter rivers like the Salmon. But this fish had flawless fins and the big shoulders, peweter flanks, and touch of rose on its gill plates of an early wild buck.
It’s the kind of fish I wrote about in the chapter called “Ghosts” in my book, The Color of Winter.” Dick Goin used to catch them on the upper Sol Duc in early December. And Department of Natural Resources fisheries biologist, Jeff Cederholm, described similar fish in the Clearwater in the 1970s. He observed that the early fish tended to be tributary spawners and that they came in “colored up,” while the wild mainstem spawners came in later and were bright.
We also saw a number of other anglers with bright hatchery fish that day. But I wouldn’t recommend a trip there right now. It’ll be very low and cold, and packed with gear fishermen. We went because we knew it would be low enough and clear enough to fish while we were waiting for the Hoh and Quillayute rivers to come back down.