Good Excuses

Fly fishing is an excellent excuse. It is an excuse to spend time with friends, to travel, to explore a watershed for the first time, or to revisit a place that you have been to many times before. The best excuse fly fishing gives me is to return to a place I love dearly and have called home for many winters over the years: Forks, Washington. A small town located on the northwest side of the Olympic peninsula known primarily for logging, rain, and vampires, but from January through March, it becomes the center point for anglers chasing world-class winter steelhead. Even though my days of living in a van at nearly vacant campgrounds near the rivers or staying with friends who were kind enough to rent me a spare room for the season have passed, I still make it a point to return for a week or so every year to go swing flies.

 

 The first week of March was the window through which my girlfriend Isabel and I could make time for the trip. As far as river conditions went, we couldn’t have timed it better. Very cold and unseasonably dry conditions through all of February had finally lifted, bringing in much-needed rain and warmer weather. It also brought with it all the anglers who thought it was not worth fishing the ice-cold trickles that were those rivers earlier in the season. Our first day was spent on my personal favorite stretch of water, the upper Hoh. The river was fishable but much lower than I like for a lot of the swing runs in this part of the river. With fourteen boats on the upper sections and intel from a friend on the lower section saying that there were at least twenty-five below us that day, it seemed like a change of venue would be the best idea.

 

The next day, we gave the lower Bogachiel a try. With far less angling pressure and flatter long sections of the river that are more conducive to lower flows, it felt like the odds were a little more in our favor. After a short hike to the run, it wasn’t long before Isabel hooked a fish. Tail walking, an entire body jump out of the water, a run down river, and straight back up just as fast. A fish that acted like a rodeo bull before tiring itself out and giving up at the leader. A good-sized buck, dime bright and probably fresh into the system from that morning's high tide.

 

The rivers didn’t change much overnight, so we returned to the same place to see if another fish had moved in to occupy the same bucket as the day before. Same fly, same sink tip, same swing, and the line goes tight. I watch from the bank as an absolutely massive tail comes out of the water twice and then, without any more jumping or theatrics, turns and runs straight downriver as if there was no drag on the reel holding it back. The following five minutes turn into a stalemate. For every five yards she could get back on the reel, the fish would turn and take six until it finally made it into the shallows of the crossover at the end of the run and wrapped the leader around a rock. Sometimes, the fish just wins, and this one did in spectacular fashion. 

 

 The rain began that night and grew heavier over the next two days. On the last day of the trip, the Hoh had nearly doubled in size since we had first arrived. This meant that the upper Hoh should be fishing. It was a day that you would expect out of a rainforest. Clouds hanging in the trees, and water across the road at every low point. We stopped at a campground and picked up a couple of friends from West Linn who were camping for the week, and we started driving up the river. We stop at a run that is as classic a steelhead run as you could get. About a hundred yards long, three to four feet deep, boulders on the bottom with a soft inside. We each tie on a fly a little different in size and color and start working our way through it one at a time. The last one through is Anders, who sticks the fish we were looking for halfway through the run. It's an awesome buck, not completely chrome like the others, but with a deep green back and the beginnings of a red strip down the side.

 

Our luck for the day continued after we had finished for the day and were driving back. The rain had caused a landslide that completely covered the road below us. With only one road in and out, there wouldn’t have been many options for a detour. Fortunately, someone from the parks service saw it before heading home for the night and ran down and grabbed an excavator to clear the road before we arrived. It would have been a long night with four soggy anglers in a Subaru outback.

 

If I’m being completely honest, winter steelhead fishing can suck. There are the days when you layer two rain jackets and still get soaked. There are days when your guides freeze after every cast, and your fingers are so cold you can barely pinch the running line against the cork. Tying flies and watching water levels every day only to go days, weeks, or even months without even getting so much as a grab. On the other hand, while pursuing these fish, I have been introduced to some of the best people I have ever met. I have been led to my favorite places and have had some of my best experiences. At the end of the day, I think that’s a pretty good excuse to keep it up.