Another whuppin'

Are you swinging for them...or nymphing?  I'll be heading out for the rivers tomorrow morning to do a little swinging. I would love to get that many hookups.  Probably 12 trips, 4 hookups, and only one to hand.  Love every moment on the river though.

Oh, if only it were 24 hookups in a year.  Sadly, that's a multi-year count.

I don't do either, now that I'm forced to think about it.  Where I can get to the rivers, they aren't really spots where one swings a fly because the steelhead travel lanes are narrow but deep channels, 6 to 10 feet wide, in stretches whee the rivers aren't much deeper than ankle deep.  It's more of a drift along the opposite bank.  Always the opposite bank.

I do let the fly swing back across the river before retrieving it, but the fish aren't out there in the shallow water and I'm only trying to not rip the fly out of the productive waters.  That's not really swinging, is it.   

I haven't fished a nymph, but only because both spots require a lot of mends and I suck at making mends at fairly long distances.  That, plus I first fished them with unweighted winter flies and just never tried anything different.

ALSO: these are coastal streams and have only a small, brief, winter run.  And because they're raging torrents when they're up, it's somewhere between extremely hard to impossible to fly-fish them (at least where I can get to them) until they drop to near-normal levels, and they defy practical kayaking at all times of year, making these my No Kayaks Involved fish tales.

Well.....just got back from the OP.  Beautiful water and weather but no grabs for me.  Got to see a guy just in front of me on a long run land a good sized native.  If only I had been there 30 min earlier....Had to be happy for him though.  His first.  He had to sit down for a good 20 mins afterwards just to calm himself down.  Pretty cool.  He and his buddy were a little slow on the release, but couldn't blame them too much.

Wasn't a steelhead but I watched a fellow land a Chinook.  His first.  He couldn't settle down, either.  Kept looking at me and saying, "Caught it on an orange Clouser!" over-and-over.

Okay.  But back then, I didn't fish with a fly rod and I had no idea what a Clouser was, never mind the color.  It is fun to watch.

Glad you found fine weather and got out.  Sometimes that's enough.

(Who am I kidding?)