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Picture Of The Month



SD2OR with a trophy fall walleye

Topic: River Drifting  (Read 2147 times)

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Tinker

  • Sturgeon
  • *******
  • Kevin
  • Location: 42.74°N 124.5°W
  • Date Registered: May 2013
  • Posts: 3304
I like to fish in the rivers down here, mostly from the bank.  I get a weird satisfaction from floating a dry fly over a trout and watching it come up to bite it.  It's weird because it's not so much the trout-catching that I enjoy as it is the trout-fooling part.

But I also like to put a kayak in a river every so often and try to fool whatever's hanging around that day, so when I got the call, "River!  Tomorrow!  Eight o'clock!" I was ready.

We always paddle upstream a couple of miles, scouting for fishy-looking spots to hit as we drift back to the ramp.  Usually we paddle a couple of miles, I mean, but I  caught the Lewis and Clark Bug and every time we decided "This is the place to start!" I'd peek around the bend and decide that place, just upstream a few hundred yards, that was the place to start.

It's a tough river to fish this time of year.  The smallmouth might be active.  There've been rumors of stripers.  We could even run into a late salmon or a steelhead.  Me, I like to fish for what's most likely in the river, so I took a 4wt rod and was intent on tricking a few smallmouth.

It was a heavily overcast morning on an ebb tide when we finally stated to fish, and it was quickly apparent that I was not going to have a good day on the river when my companion started catching what we'll call "micro-bass".  They were bass, but they were barely visible to the naked eye, and about the same size the fly he was flinging.  Nonetheless, I spent the morning being entertained by whoops and shouts and listening to the threats, "Welcome to the House of Pain!" whenever another micro-trout was yanked, rudely, out of the water.

Fishing that river is always an aggravation for me.  I'll float down to just above a spot I want to fish and hold my position watching for how the current flows until I have a clear picture of where I want to start drifting, silently, to the perfect place to start casting... and it never works.  There'll be a sunken tree that I won't notice until I have to scramble to miss it.  I'll snag something on the bottom.  The wind will blow me off the drift.  All I can do then is paddle back upstream, wait for the ruckus I raised to settle, and start my drift again.  Sometimes it takes me five or six attempts to make the perfect drift, just as I'd pictured it in my head... and still find no fish.

So yes, the entertainment value of all the celebrations over catching a micro-bass does, eventually, fade a bit when it's not you catching the fish, and you start wondering what on earth had you been thinking when you paddled that extra mile and a half.

By then, most of the day's entertainment had settled into, "Tinker, Tinker, Tinker, however did you catch that tree branch, way up there?" and "Hey!  You need any help getting that fly out of the bushes?"  Just my usual comedy routine.

Around noon the sun broke through and I've never seen a heavy overcast disappear so completely and so quickly.  One minute my fingers are chilled and three minutes later I'm wondering what clothes I can take off and not get arrested, and wishing I'd brought my darker sunglasses.

But when the sun comes out, the smallmouth move up, looking for warmer water in the shallows, and by luck, we were approaching one of the few, short sections of rocky bank.  Had we been closer together than our customary quarter-mile of separation, I might have put on a smallmouth seminar because I got hot.  Or at least as hot as we were going to get that day.

I'm not much of a whooper or hollerer these days, so I was quietly catching and putting back some nice little 10 and 12 inch fish, and just hoping someone was looking in my direction.  Until my last fish of the day rammed me, anyway.

The bite was subtle.  Just a little resistance on the line, as if you foul-hooked a leaf, and if you yanked on the line it would go slack, but if you kept steadily retrieving line, you'd soon feel the fish on the other end.  And as soon as I felt that one last fish and strip-set the hook, it charged up and Bam! rammed me.  Neither the fish nor the kayak suffered any damage in the collision, but it did elicit a "Holy cow!" out of me - and, at last, got me some well-deserved attention.

It was getting late, for me anyway, and we started back to the ramp, pausing briefly while my companion kept trying to catch some bass that were at least visible, and hoping to find some anywhere near the size those I'd caught - and having no luck at it.  Obviously, all that earlier talk about "Welcome to the House of Pain" had drifted downstream ahead of us and scared all the fish away from his kayak.

We finally made it back to the ramp and for once I managed to exit my kayak without ending up in the water on hands and knees, but sadly, my never-say-die companion was still fishing and missed my triumphant landing.  Rats!

I've been a bit under the weather lately and as I huffed and puffed up the ramp to the parking lot, my dearest friend and fishing companion came back and, in spite of my protestations of "I'm at the top already!" he hauled my kayak up the last three or four feet of the ramp, because he's that kind of a guy.

Gear stowed and kayaks loaded, he wandered over and casually asked what fly had worked and I handed him the most awful-looking little saltwater fly ever conceived.  I'd tied it to fish for flounder last year, but never got around to using it.  While he was staring at the fly in disbelief, I changed into my travelling clothes.  Finally, he asked, "Why'd you choose this fly!?"  Well, because it's all sparkly and pretty, as you can plainly see.

Truth was that I'd lost two lovely-looking river-flies to snags, and after I lost that second fly, I decided that if was going to keep losing flies, they were going to be butt-ugly flies I didn't care about.

Folks, it's not the fly on the line, it's the guy on the pole.

(Let's not tell him that last part or next time he might stand in the parking lot laughing at me struggling up the ramp - because he's that kind of a guy, too.)
« Last Edit: June 29, 2018, 07:00:30 AM by Tinker »
I expected the worst, but it was worse than I expected...


 

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