Goodbye Summer, Hello Rain... and Fish...

 

Did you know that is rains in the Pacific Northwest? If you spent a day on a river in Washington in July or August you would probably think the answer is NO. If you were to hang around until the fall, you would learn the truth. The end of summer is often a big mystery in the Pacific Northwest, sometimes September is one of the nicest months of the year and some years, it rains…a lot. Once summer is gone, it is gone for good and the grey skies and dark clouds set up shop right over the top of Washington State for the next nine months.

This year being an odd year, we were graced with the presence of 6 million slimy humpies that dumped themselves into our Puget Sound rivers about mid August. At first, I was super pumped and couldn’t wait to target humpies and fill my smoker. Now, I can’t swing a fly down a river without hooking one of these things in the hump. It’s like reeling in a piece of drift wood sideways. I never thought I would be annoyed by catching a fish, but I’ve had enough Pink salmon action to keep me content for the next two years. So as September rolled around and as the month progressed, it was time to start thinking about the Pink salmon’s less slimy relative, the Coho.

As most people in the PNW are upset to see summer time come to an end, the river fisherman of our state are chomping at the bit waiting on the first big rain. This time of year there are often thousands of staging Coho in the Puget Sound waiting for their chance to shoot up the rivers where they will swim to their fire engine red transformation. This last week brought in some of these rains, so we decided to hit the river.

The week before Saturday September 28^th, the weatherman was calling for extreme rains that would blow out all the rivers in no time, flood warnings and all. Listening to the radio on our drive out to the Skykomish river Saturday morning, they were saying how this was a good weekend to stay at home and tie leaders. We figured we had a couple hour window first thing in the morning before the river turned to sludge.

Steelhead are almost always my first priority when hitting the river, so after we made a pass through one of the usual runs on the Skykomish, we decided to head down to the mouth of the Wallace river and see if there were any Silvers milling around. 99 times out of 100 there is already someone standing under the train trestle on the Wallace River. I think the cats and dogs falling out of the sky scared off all the regulars this morning, as we walked up through the woods to find no one. By now, the rain was coming down harder than Shaq in the 90’s breaking backboards.

I have a messed up obsession for chasing steelhead with my fly rod, so I continued to fish down towards the mouth looking for steelhead. If there is a chance that a hunk of steel may be nearby, I want to chase it, even if the odds were against me. Katie stayed up river near the trestle, and no more than 10 minutes later she had a silver on the sandy beach. I instantly became jealous and started winging my fly up into the hole where she just hooked the fish. To my surprise, all I hooked were humpies, no matter where I go there is a humpy to be reeled in tail first. The river was starting to change before our eyes and it was only a matter of time before it would achieve full blown out status. So we bonked the hatchery silver and took it home for the bbq.

That morning when we arrived to the river, the Skykomish was flowing about 1500 CFS, by evening the same day, it was flowing over 14,000 CFS (15,000 CFS is flood status). The next morning it was up to 18,000 CFS. These crazy rains are the rains that all of us river fisherman have been waiting for. Once all the houses and cars stop floating down the river, there will be nothing left but fish for the catching. Fall is here, and winter is right around the corner. For many of us this is our favorite time of the year. Happy fishing.