I met Charlie
Maestro for the first time yesterday and floated the Cedar from Milepost 18 to a
takeout just above the 149th St bridge in Renton. It would have been nice
to put in a little further downriver as there are three sweepers in a row
shortly after the put in. The first two sweepers could be pretty easily
navigated around. The third sweeper required us to port our boats
around. Fortunately there was a nice path skirting the sweeper so it
wasn't all that bad... there's also a fair amount of somewhat tricky water
on this stretch: lots of rocks, stumps, etc. The flows were down
around 300 so there was also a good amount of skinny water that required walking
the boats thru.
We started at
about 10 a.m. and took out at about 8 p.m. Between the two
of us we must have landed about 30 bows during the course of the day including a
15-inch cutthroat, the first true cutt I've seen on the Cedar in all
the days I've fished it (seen numerous cutt-bows). Fish of the
day was a 19-inch bow that had a freakin motor on it and truly put the
skills to the test. I'm posting both pics to the photo gallery
on this site. There were also a fair number of whitefish that came to
hand. It was a deep nymphing game all day long.
No notable
hatches. Oh, actually there was a significant "rubber hatch" once we got
down to the stretch that runs past the park. The bikini and shorts clad
innertubers and rafters didn't seem to have a negative impact on the
fishing though. Why do they always have to float thru the very best part
of the runs though? Hmmm...
Charlie had a GPS
and we came up with some interesting notes:
the flow:
about 320
total floating
time: about 2 hrs 40 mins
total stopped
(fishing) time: about 7.5 hrs
total river miles
for this stretch: 6.25
total miles by
road: 5
Needless to say we
were both exhausted after such a long day of fishing! It was great to
float/fish with Charlie, for those of you who haven't met him, he's a good guy
to fish with!
-tight lines
all-
Jim
Speaker
