As a sad sidebar to the Thor thread, I grew up in the little town of Fortuna on Northern California's famous Eel River. Just a short bike ride away, I first fished the Eel as a grade school kid in the 1960s with worms and salmon eggs, catching creels full of what I thought were trout, but which were probably juvenile steelhead instead. As a college student, I learned to fly cast and extensively fished the Eel and neighboring Van Duzen, Mad, Trinity and Klamath rivers. When I started tying flies, the Thor was one of the first patterns I learned - with real polar bear hair! But getting polar bear hair today is easy compared with catching fish in the Eel River. Today's Eel is a pathetic poster child for fished-out rivers. Historically, the Eel enjoyed California's largest runs of chinook, coho and steelhead, eclipsing even the massive Sacramento and San Joaquin river runs. Beginning in the 1870s, Eel River salmon spawned an extensive and lucrative freshwater canning industry. With daily catches measured by the ton, Eel River canned salmon became a highly prized delicacy and fetched premium prices in San Francisco, New York and London. But the intensive horse- and steam-powered freshwater netting operations finally annihilated the salmon runs. The last of the canneries failed before the first World War. Shunned by the canneries, the river's huge steelhead attracted sport fishers from around the world through the 1950s. But even these robust fish couldn't overcome the combined pressures of sportfishing, increased Native American gill netting and spawning habitat degradation due to irresponsible logging practices. Sadly, the Eel River no longer sustains any anadramous fish runs. My uncle has published numerous articles and books on the history and decline of the Eel and California's early steelhead and salmon fisheries. I'd be happy to share copies of those I have with any other mourners among our group. Kent Lufkin >The Thor is not only "like the old, standard flies", it's one of them. It >was first tied by C. Jim Pray and was named for Walter J. Thoreson who used >it on the Eel river in 1936. Most of the traditional white-winged steelhead >flies were tied with polar bear hair and a Skykomish Sunrise, Polar Shrimp >or a Brad's Brat tied with anything else is only a pale imitation of the >original.
