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Patrick and I headed South this weekend.
We started off Saturday morning on the Kalama - the water
was skinning (not surprising) and the fish VERY dark (we did not make it
all the way up to the Holy water as the goal was to find some active salmon). We
then went down to the tide water and fished amongst the snaggers below I-5 for a
while and I hooked a fish (a first on my spey rod), but we decided that we
did not want to spend another 1.5 days there - so headed west. Stopped at the
Elochoman to look. Not a lot of water right now - barely enough to cover
the backs of the salmon and then wound our way to the Naselle. After debating
about whether to call the weekend trip a one day affair and motor back to
Seattle we decided to go ahead and wet a line. We stopped and parked at a bridge
with a large collection of other parked vehicles and walked downstream. We
started fishing at the tailout of the first hole. Within about 10 minutes I
hooked in to a decent king on my six weight, which proceeded to wear both
of us out. I did not manage to keep it in the hole, but I did manage to land it
- a ~25 lb buck at early stages of being dark. We decided to spend the
night and then fished again this morning - this time Patrick landed a ~15
lb king (dark) and had head shakes from another fish. I was pleasantly surprised
at the Naselle - I thought it was fun to fish (aside from several obvious groups
of snaggers parked in key holes...) and I anticipate fishing it again. Patrick
was also fired up, so I expect that he will be back as well. We did see quite a
few silvers (brighter) taken -mostly snagged-, out of one of the holes. We did
not see a lot of fish moving upstream, so the rain was not enough to get
them moving en masse in the daylight. We ran in to one other fly fisherman
Saturday evening, but we did not run across any on Sunday.
We stopped at the Nemah on the way back to Seattle, but did
not fish - just looked at the fish and shot some video of big kings digging
reds and chasing each other.
Tight lines,
Andy
PS the kings were hooked on floating lines, 10' leaders, and
large black strip leaches. Unfortunately, my 9 weight was broken at Seiku
several weekends back, so I was relegated to fishing either my 15' 10 weight
spey rod or my 6 weight - which is how I ended up in the extended tussle on
the six weight. Thankfully it proved up to the task! We did not manage to hook
any silvers in the Naselle even though most of the fish we saw snagged or fair
hooked were Cohos. |
