Mark Martin

It’s a strange year to be a person who swings flies for steelhead around here.  Most strangely, there aren’t really all that many fish at which you’d swing.  I won’t get into it.   If you have any awareness of the inland Northwest steelhead fisheries, you know what’s happening with the upper Columbia and Snake tributaries.

The grim news started coming in this spring, when fish began to trickle over Bonneville.  Record-low counts, then even lower.  The worst was the projected wild-fish return:  about 1,000 native fish to the whole state of Idaho, to split between eleven or so rivers.  In case it’s not obvious, that is AWFUL.  A few years of this in a row could send some of the smaller-river strains on a straight, short path to extinction.

Due to the present reality, I did a lot of thinking this summer.  I conclude it’s time to have conversations about limiting our effects as fishermen, whether fly or spin.  In the interest of putting my money where my mouth is, I came up with the plan to just not fish this fall.  Not that I’m a particularly deadly force, but we know that there can be unintended mortality associated with catch-and-release practices.  I’d never get over it if I hooked a wild fish and unintentionally fought it to exhaustion.

 

 

I almost made it. I sat out all of October, swung up some trout, did other river trips and cut firewood.  When my buddy Ian invited me to float one of our favorite sections of a local river the other day, I broke down.  I decided it was unlikely I’d hang one anyway, and thought I’d make sure by not bringing a sink tip, and just fishing dry.  The water temp had been hovering in the lower 40’s, what could possibly go wrong?

 

 

 

It’s an entertaining, though useless, exercise to think at least briefly about what the odds were that we’d hook a single steelhead.  Then, what were the odds that we’d hook two, on dries?  That the one landed would be a native fish?  What were the odds we’d get grabbed in nearly every run we stepped into?  There’s one answer to all these musings: the odds were, inexplicably, 100%.

If there’s a moral to the story, it’s got to be this:  if you truly deep-down don’t want to catch anything, don’t go fishing.

 

Rods: 13’7″ Onyx 7Wt., 12’6″ Platinum 6Wt, 12’4″ Platinum 8Wt, and a couple other randoms.

Lines: AeroHead 510, Scandi 400, and a home-chopped hybrid.

Flies:  a purple Muddler, a foam-backed October Caddis skater, and some freestylers.

Dogs: 4 black ones.

Boat: Juuuust barely big enough.

The Fish:  A zippy little hen with translucent, white-tipped fins.  Perfection in a summer steelhead.

 

I’ll admit, I can be somewhat of a Quixotic character at times.  I’m drawn to activities whose point or purpose tips a bit to the side of aesthetic rather than pragmatic.  Most happen outdoors, and are sensuous in nature – the kinds of stuff that feel really good, but are hard to describe.  Like a telemark turn, or greasing a rapid in a drift boat.  Or like a two-handed cast that lays out perfectly…so naturally, I swing flies for steelhead.  I’ve obtained a bunch of soulful Beulah two-handers and industrial-strength reels and other stuff that is destined to handle far fewer fish than any of my other gear.  I tie a lot of flies that don’t really imitate anything in particular, but are a kind of swimming poem.  I spend time thinking about what the steelhead might be thinking about.  And approximately once a year, around when the world’s youth are engaged in elaborate spring-break rituals, I travel to the coast of Washifornegon and spend as many days as I can string together, seeking a bright winter-run fish.

I have this friend named James with a similar set of fishing tendencies, who lives on the southern end of Washifornegon, in a region referred to by its inhabitants as Jefferson.  I usually start with him on his home rivers.  For a while I’d been on a break from catching winter steelhead, focusing instead on improving my casting, tailing fish for others, and a little bit of rainforest botany and mycology.  I have to admit I was hoping I’d find a fish or two this time – it just gets tiresome to explain, you know?  – “No, I haven’t caught one in two years.  No, I don’t really mind.  It’s just nice to be on those rivers, on the hunt, immersing yourself in…Never mind.”

I’ve always maintained it’s better to be lucky than good.  I think I’m living proof.  Some days, too, if you’re doing it right, before your fly hits the water you count yourself lucky.  If you look around and you’re in the Northwest, steeped in moss-covered forest, next to a dropping, clearing steelhead river, aren’t you fortunate enough already? What more do you truly need? Whether or not I truly need it, sometimes I go asking for it.

Against all statistical odds and probably some karmic ones, I got luckier.  I didn’t manage much for photo documentation of measurable success, but I have some photographic memories to hang on to.  A two-fish day in hammering rain, all by myself in a small inflatable kayak on 6,000 CFS made for a milestone.

A series of 1-for-whatever and 0-for-something days followed that up, but since none of them were witnessed by James or any other living soul, I guess you can decide for yourself whether any of it even happened.  In any case, the south coast of Washifornegon was good to me, and the drag on my favorite reel got some solid exercise.

As spring break marched on, I had to follow the open season northward.  In the central Washifornegon coast there’s a place where the steelhead streams are clustered especially thick, and some long stretches of swingy water stay open through the spring.  I went to that place because I’d never been, and it was time for some solo exploration and reflection.  I like adding new rivers to my repertoire.

I found lots of low and clear, which I far prefer to chocolate milk in the trees.  And I also found fish.  I spotted fish but went grabless on a tunnel-like little stream of clear blue water and unfurling lady ferns.  I switched to a larger stream and began to get that funny feeling in well-structured bedrock and boulder runs with broken surfaces…and had grabby days.  The punctuation to my spring break was a fish that crushed a UV black-and-red squid twenty feet above the lip of a tailout.  The tailout led to a couple tenths of a mile of steep, eddy-less whitewater, and thence to a complicated class-V drop.  When this fish headed downstream, things, as one might expect, became epic.  I have no photograph to back up this experience, so let your imagination supply the steelhead, the “fight”, etc.  I’ve never felt so outgunned and thoroughly ass-kicked by a fish.  I’m satisfied to say that I didn’t land it.  To do such a thing would have taken a skilled net guy (which I categorically didn’t have), or fighting to its utter exhaustion the most impressive freshwater native fish I’ve ever seen, let alone hooked.  I hope he found a lovely lady and spawned like the champion he was.

This is how you don’t ever expect a fishing trip to end:  reeling up your broken tippet with shaking hands, squelching your way in overtopped waders up to the truck, changing, getting in, and immediately turning it for home.  An hour out from being a rainforest river creature, you’re in the systemic shock of Portland traffic.  By the same time the next day, your’e home, the truck’s unpacked and your laundry’s done.  Did it all really even happen?  Of course it did, but it’s still hard to wrap your head around how lucky you really are to get to live a long-held dream, for a week and a half, every single year.

Postscript, James has made this all possible for me several times; with river beta, sensuously satisfying two-handers, couch space, hotel room sharing, swapped photography, good Scotch, truck shuttles, etc, etc.   And for it all I’m duly thankful.   Couldn’t have done it without you.

In September, I met Carl and his girlfriend Fredi at the Middle Fork River Expeditions boathouse in Stanley, ID.  They were on the happy side of a 24-hour travel day from his home in Florida.  I gave them an abbreviated introduction to the 6-day float beginning in the morning, and we parted ways for the night with handshakes and admiration of the Sawtooths in the forest fire smoke on the southern sky.  The next we saw each other we were boarding a little Cessna to fly over half the Frank Church Wilderness to the Middle Fork.

We landed, we floated, we fished, we ate, we drank.  I didn’t end up rowing for Carl and Fredi for a few days.  When I did, I noticed that Carl, while just as proficient as any of the other fisherman on our trip (and maybe with a stronger skill set than some),  – well, there’s only one way to put it – he was really laid back.  He was the rare kind of fisherman that’s a pleasure to row for, especially in a place like the Middle Fork:  he could hit every seam and bucket I pointed out, effortlessly manage a perfect drift, and then completely forget about it all to stare up at the otherworldly canyon around him.  He was a thoughtful guy; we talked at length about our lives, on and off the water.

But anyway…I want to highlight a fish that Carl caught just after lunch.  If you’re expecting a big stout slabby cutthroat, well, I’m sorry.  This isn’t one of those stories.  If I lost you by now, that’s cool – you can head back to Facebook or whatever.

We descended a steep riffle into a very steelheady run/pool on a 90-degree right, immediately above the rapid known as Haystack.  (Picture a 100-yard long steep boulder garden with sculpted pinkish-tan granite chunks the size of studio apartments.)  On the outside of the bend above Haystack is a fishy series of exposed and submerged boulders, seldom fished because of their proximity to a long hallway of wrap hazards.  A split-topped boulder begins the lineup of holding water, its upper four feet exposed at most flows.  Its upstream face is flat enough to form a little subsurface pillow…that is big enough to hold a decent trout…and it lies directly in the path of the bubble-line seam coming off a promontory of the left bank…   And so you get the idea: I pointed the spot out, Carl made a perfect cast and a perfect drift, and a trout rose and ate just above the boulder.

 

This was Carl’s fish.  As you can see, it’ll never be in a magazine.  It might hit fourteen inches on a good day, and it’s not exactly a physical specimen of a fish.  If you’re used to looking at pictures of fish that others display on various social media platforms and other interweb whatnots, upon first glance this might be a sad-looking trout.  In fact, I submit that if most of us caught this fish, we’d be immediately kind of unimpressed, if not straight disappointed.  You know:  You’d show him to your buddy, say something like “Not bad, kinda skinny though…” and release him, and get back to trying for your real prize – a fat, brilliant 16 or 17-incher.  Or whatever your ideal looks like.

I’d like to go a little deeper.  If you take a close look at this trout, you can see his belly and flanks are scratched up, scarred and healed.  The bottom lobe of his tail fin’s a little worn.  The bone structure that supports his dorsal fin is pretty well-represented.  His colors are a little muted.  What all this means to me, is that this trout led a pretty damn interesting life.  He was decidedly not the captain of the football team, who did well in college and grad school, and settled comfortably into a nice steady career and a sterile, featureless life in the trout suburbs.  Not a chance.  I’ve been making up narratives for him every now and then for some months – like maybe his natal spawning creek was a super hard place in which to make a living, and he barely made it down to the relative buffet line of the river with his life.  Or maybe he was just not quite big enough to throw his weight around in the creek, and got beat up and marginalized by the 15 and 16-inchers.

Or maybe, life’s just not that easy for any wild fish in any river, and we who would presume to prey, even if temporarily, upon these feisty little bad-asses ought to think that through from time to time; and let it sink into our flyfishing consciousness.  An inordinate amount of things have to go right for a trout to make it to an appreciable dry fly-eating size.

For sure, these are the musings of someone who has been getting into snorkeling more and more during time when he really could be fishing, just to watch trout and sculpins and caddis larvae and the like going about their lives.   On occasion it informs a fly pattern I’m developing, but more often I just like watching the Planet Earth episode that happens beneath river surfaces. Not to get too preachy, but I definitely see a majority of flyfishing happening to fuel ego-driven achievements these days, and a vast minority of it as an extension of someone’s naturalist curiosity about river life.

Which brings me back to my friend Carl.  When he briefly lifted his fish from the water for a photo, I remember saying something like “Damn…he looks a little haggard.”

Carl the tarpon fisherman said “But he’s beautiful.”

 

 

It’d been two years since I landed a steelhead.  I know that for a guy who writes a blog partially about fishing for steelhead and lives well within the range of anadromous fish in the Northwest, that seems kind of rugged.  Believe me, for a solid while it was just as rugged as it would seem.  After a while, though, my ego and I had a little chat, whereupon my ego chilled out and let the rest of me enjoy swinging flies with, as we say, “no expectations, but complete confidence”.

My dad makes a trip to Idaho and/or Oregon each fall to swing flies for steelhead.  He’s been hitting the milestones just as slowly as you’d expect, yet steadily as well – first steelhead, first Clearwater fish, etc.  This year we ended up spending a solid week on the Clearwater.  Fish numbers over Lower Granite plus in-river conditions made it seem like a good idea, and on our first night, at one of our favorite runs, he caught this fish:

Not a giant steelhead, nor even a particularly spirited or wild fish.  But a fish nonetheless.  A side note, is that he was throwing a brand-new AeroHead on a brand-new 13’2” Platinum 7.  Brand new as in, I just peeled the plastic off the cork in the parking spot before we stepped in.  I’ve caught steelhead on two brandy-spanking new Beulah two-handers (both fish from the very first run each rod swung), and now, I enjoy reporting that my dad’s done it as well.

The next day, my friend Ian and I found twin hatchery hens.  It was starting to be really easy to step into runs with no expectations but complete confidence.

The next day?  No pictures, but Ian and I each hung big, solid fish on dry flies.  It hammered rain, blew, and for the second day in a row, we never saw another fisherman.  I repeat, we were on the Clearwater…where the bejesus was everybody?  Never mind, I don’t care.  Even if we hadn’t been feeling fishy, it would still have been worth it to be up there all by ourselves.

The weekend came.  Early on we found a couple, no fish to hand but… the rain fell, the water rose, the bro-show descended, and the fish disappeared.  Hope faded.

We ended up unintentionally staying an extra night.  I’ll spare the long story, but you know how it can be:  you have stuff to do, somebody to meet; and it takes longer than planned, and on top of it they’re late.  Not a big deal, but it’s not worth starting the tortuous 3-hour slog back home at nine at night.  I wasn’t looking forward to it anyway, and I think both Dad and I were relieved when we were able to admit to each other that it’d be fine to just sack out in the back of the truck again, hit the Upper Spalding Coffee Grinder Hole in the Wall Grease Bucket run in the morning, and head home at a leisurely, medium pace once the sun started baking the river.

Morning brought the river valley’s first frost, eerily swirling low-down fog, and back to back big, chunky fish for both of us.  Interestingly, Dad fished his first pass through the run without touching a fish.  When I got one behind him, he got back in and found his personal best fish to date.  Not a lot of things in my life seem as much worth doing as when I can be a part of my dad’s excitement over a very big, strong steelhead.  I’ve seldom seen him so elated, and thus, I can’t help but hope that there are always steelhead for him to get elated about.  The “sport” (or whatever you’d call our little subset), and the rivers it plays out on, may be getting pretty thick with people, but I’d recommend anyway taking somebody steelhead fishing that’s new(ish) to it.  Make sure it’s somebody who deserves it, who will take care of it, if you know what I mean.  And that they won’t give your money spots away.  If they stick one, you’ll feel that excitement, vicariously, all over again.  It’s worth it.

         

We came home, and Dad flew back to Maine.  If I can get all my firewood set, plus my garlic planted, and the yard and house ready for winter, I’ll be back out again and I’ll write about it.  Meanwhile, know that this is happening on rivers of the Northwest, and make yourself a part of it if you can:

 

John and his wife came to the Middle Fork Salmon from Brooklyn.  He was a writer, she was a nurse.  While six days of roughish camping and float dry-fly fishing may not have been squarely in their comfort zones, we were comfortable with each other.  I think there’s an effect whereby having very little in common can lead to some of the best conversation; kind of an inverse of what you’d expect.  Anyway, despite John’s pelagic fishing experience on the Atlantic, neither he nor LuHung had really spent any time with a fly rod.  As is usual, the first day was a learning curve of casting and dead-drifting; and for me, getting a feel for just how gung-ho these guys were – in other words, how badly they wanted to catch trout, and how many they expected to catch.  I did my normal dance between instruction and forming a true interpersonal connection, but there was one thing I couldn’t figure out.  One spot on the record where the needle kept skipping, if you will.  I couldn’t figure out for the life of me if I needed to, or even should, bring up this one thing:  Neither of them seemed to be able to hook a trout.  Out of the literal dozens that came up to eat their flies, each turned and dove for the depths again.  Now, as a guide, this is kind of troubling in a sense – the hooking of a fish is a goal of sorts, a measure of success for most; including the guide.  But did they care?  Were they trying to hide embarrassment at their seeming inability to stick one, and if I brought it up, it’d introduce the kind of awkward that’d change our dynamic for the duration?

In the end, the guide-y guide side of me came through.  I brought it up.  I don’t remember how, but I brought it up.  John looked back and grinned, and said, “We talked about it before we even got on the boat… we don’t need to hook a fish.  We just want to watch ‘em do what they do.  These trout are beautiful.  They’re like nothing we’ve ever seen back East, and we’d almost rather not drag them around too much.”

Fine with me.  Because as it turns out, that attitude meant we could relate to each other.  They’d somehow entered into fly fishing with a mentality that normally takes years to develop (it did for me anyway).   Quite a few  (the horde of brand-name clad, PBR-swilling, fish-counting, big-ego bro’s who seem to be multiplying on every river system in every mountain town) never seem to develop it at all.  John and LuHung were folks who, by default, already knew that there was more to life and self-satisfaction than some quantitative kind of fly fishing success: a notion I totally embrace despite identifying with fly fishing as pretty much my over-arching lifestyle.

But it was still somehow really, really hard to watch them not set the hook on all those fish.

 

 

 

Today, friends, I give you trout porn.  Not much other than trout porn. I’ve gotten blanked more than I’d like to admit, and had a couple spectacular days as well.

It’s a delicate time of year where I fish:  some rainbows are starting to dig redds and get their groove on, while others are tanked up in perfect swing runs, getting hormonally enraged and hungry.  Several days’ time can tip the balance, and suddenly they’re all spawning, and thus off-limits to any angler with a brain or heart, or indeed any consideration for something other than his fragile ego and attendant instagram feed.  As far as I can see, we’re tipping now; and in a few more days, they’ll have passed on wild genetics to a new generation.  Still a delicate time – again, if you’re not too concerned about grip-and-grins on your social media self-representation, you probably don’t want to poke too many malnourished post-spawners either.  (Mind the holes/runs above and below a redd – usually those contain the fish that didn’t want to hang out on their redd in the shallow water all day, in plain sight of every predator, but are spawners nonetheless.) (And by “mind”, I mean, “Don’t fish”.)

So let’s tie some flies, yeah?  Summer’s a half-step away, and in about two short months you’ll find cutties looking skyward for the first salmon flies and other early stones.  There are summer streamer ideas (and proven favorites) to be birthed from that vise, and while I’m thinking of it, summer steelhead are probably starting to turn homeward from Katmchatka or the Aleutians or wherever they’ve been.

Anyways.  On to the promised trout porn.  Retrospective winter steelhead and summer cutthroat writings to come.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Date: The other day.

Time:  Mid-afternoon.

Weather:  Sloppy snowstorm.

My Mood:  Rather poor.

Final Decision:  What the hell.

Rod:  Beulah 9’9” Platinum 7wt.

Line:  Hand chopped 270 gr. franken-skagit.  9 feet of T6.

Fly:  Olive/black Gartside Soft Hackle.

The technique:  Letting the fly dangle idly (hopelessly, almost) while thrashing my left arm to warm up my hand.  Whoops…there’s one.

Spend a couple hours on washboard roads, gritting your teeth, and listening to parts of your truck gradually loosen and begin to rattle….

Find the river.  Turn, drive upstream.  Find the right pullout where the little valley spills in from the other side….

Pull over there.  Jump out.  Let the dogs jump out and sniff and pee on stuff.  Stretch with excitement in the sudden quiet….

Assemble your gear, whistle the pups into line, and start hiking.  Wade the river, and leave two good beers in the mouth of the creek.  Head up that valley….

Give it an hour, that should be enough.  Turn down to the creek at the dead tree, just past the big rock, but if you hit that clump of bushes you’ve gone too far…

Stick the key in the lock, say the password, kneel at the altar, rub your lucky rock, take a sip of whiskey….

Or whatever you think works….

You’ll see the pool where you should start.  You wouldn’t think that it’d hold that many fish, ….but it might.  You won’t think any of them will crack two feet, bend out a tube-fly hook,  lead you a hundred yards downstream, or almost beach themselves chasing your fly into the shallows, either….

But they might.  One way to find out.

 

Several years ago, some friends and I came upon what became one of my favorite outdoor films:  a production called Signatures.  It embodied most of what I believe in about the work and play I take part in; but to the point, something said by one of the film’s featured Japanese fly-fishermen stayed with me.  He said that in Japan, they didn’t fish for particular species as much as they fished seasons – one season, a particular trout would be available; as that season faded, the cherry salmon or some other species would show up or start feeding. This glimpse of fishing lifestyle struck a chord with me then, as I realized that I’ve ended up living and fishing a lot like this.

In central Idaho, most of the woods and waters are still pretty wild.  Rivers are freestone and vary widely in flow and temperature throughout the year.  By late fall, say, most of the fishing in this area is laid to rest, replaced by backcountry skiing the snow that becomes next year’s river.  In the spring, the rivers swell with this runoff and rush greenish-brown and icy for several weeks.  As the snowpack and its attendant melt recedes, the landscape is just starting to fluoresce into its short-lived vibrant green, and some of the trout that we identify with these freestone rivers begin to creep back into the summer places from which we know them.  In other words, we fish seasons.

The middle of spring’s season brings back into the rivers a predator fish unlike any other I know of.  The bull trout hasn’t had an easy go of things – in a time recent enough that your grandfather could remember it, a bounty was actually placed on them with a cash reward for their tails.  The theory was, of course, that the bull trout’s appetite for chinook salmon smolt was responsible for the salmon’s decline – never mind the overharvest, slash-and-burn logging, downstream construction of massive fish killing dams, or any human factor.  So the bull trout were intentionally killed by anglers, then decimated by the same salmon decline for which they were blamed.  Put in these contexts, it’s a testament to their overall toughness that they’ve managed to survive as a species at all.  In some out-of-the way places, they persist, and maybe even almost thrive.  They’re never an easy drive to get to, they’re never exactly abundant, and there’s never a guarantee that you’ll even hook one.  The camping’s not the most comfortable this time of year either, but this is a hunt that is always worthy of the season.

Did I mention the fishing for them isn’t the simplest either?  Honestly, if I thought I needed fewer split shot to get to these fish, I’d use fewer split shot.  I guess one could say this is trout fishing, but like the fish themselves, it’s a pretty unique form.  In no other situation have I ever caught such ugly, beautiful, angry fish so close to my rod tip, or seen such an aggressive fish be so wary of the goings-on above the water’s surface.  More often than I probably ought to admit, I’ve watched bull trout, who are spoken of as being voracious to the point of true stupidity, utterly ignore my fly – hell, several flies – on swing after swing.  The more I find them, the more I learn about them, the more I respect them.

In this season, my 9’9” Platinum 7-weight thrives.  Throwing a half-ounce of split shot and a cone-weighted tube streamer.  And by “throwing” I mean getting it anywhere from ten feet away to across the run to that little boulder cluster that might be just enough of a current break.    It’s got enough length to manage what a couple buddies and I half-jokingly call “Czech streamering” (more on that in another post, perhaps), but is compact enough to sneak through the willow tangle of a tight little canyon.  And though you can probably get the biggest, toughest bulls to hand with a smaller rod, I’d prefer not to exhaust them.  Even with this setup I pretty much always feel like we’re an even enough match.  I’ve said it before, they’re tough.

I discovered bull trout the first week I lived in Idaho, and it’s been a love affair ever since.  I love out-of-the-way, I love hidden in plain sight, and I love the glamor-free approach that bull trout demand.  I love how they sometimes crush a baitfish fly in a 180 degree head to tail turn, and how they sometimes seem to just gently materialize as growing tension upon it; as if to eat something before it knows it’s dead.

 

This week, I watched a second bull trout circle and slash around the one I was fighting, trying to eat my tube fly that had slid up my leader.  A couple times I saw it actually take the second fly, shake it like a dog with a rope toy, and release it once it realized something wasn’t right.  I landed the one, and never did tempt the other back.  Half an hour and three or four holes later, I hooked the most vibrantly colored cutthroat I’ve ever seen.

 

I’ll admit that some of my favorite things about the season are actually not in the river at all.  When the spring rain comes around and switches off with some warmer days, some good food grows in the woods around here.  It’s been a great season for mushrooms such as morels, and other little wild edibles.  In fact, I found a good wild onion patch right after I released that cutthroat.  They ended up garnishing a batch of posole, and also transplanted into the greenhouse at the warehouse I guide out of.  Hopefully they’ll seed out and keep our food seasoned for a few years to come.  Anyways, that’s all I have for now.  The rain just let up a little, and it’s probably time I headed to the river; this season isn’t going to fish itself.