Fishing is Fun!

Years ago, Lucas Horm Young and I traveled to The Land of the Long White Cloud in search of freedom and fish.  We found these and much more on the South Island of New Zealand.  In the small town of Athol, resides a man who loves fishing as much as anyone I've met.  Stu Tripney owns and operates Stu's Orgasmic Fly Shop, on which is noted "Fishing is Fun!"  The three of us have kept in touch over the years and with Stu in the States on a road trip this summer, we were able to rendez-vous for a weekend of fishing.  It was a great chance for Lucas and I to start to repay the favor to Stu for showing us his home water.  The great photos below were taken by Stu.  Enjoy!

 

First stop, Hood Canal.  Lucas and I took Clyde here last fall.  It's a great place to have some fun fishing, catching, camp firing and hanging out.  We piled just enough gear into Stu's van.

More rigging.  You can see Stu's great van, complete with salmon artwork.  He dubbed the van "Chinook" until he was informed that the salmon on the side of it were Coho.  Unfortunately we couldn't find any silvers to match the whip.

Camp fire cookin'.  Friends and fire equals fun!

Some cool rod tubes and my vest, given to me from my father at age nine.  It's been a few places.

That night a flying termite hatch came off.  While the cutthroat keyed in on the big, floating bugs, we were left to our clousers and baitfish patterns.  Besides a massive pink gurgler, not a single dry fly was carried with any of us.  Bummer.

The Basstards do coffee.

Ol' Jess catches one!

We crammed Lucas into the van with the YETI, a half-cord of firewood and the trash bags.  He also had the beer back there, so we didn't feel too bad.

A D on the Duc.

We spent a day with Jim out on the coast, sight casting to pods of coho.  This was very fun!

I think the name of this pool was Mossy Rock, or something like that. 

Floating in the sun is fun!

Chilling in the sun is fun, too!

STP

That means Secret Trout Pond. From friend Nick Kelley.

the pond

when i began my relocation to Bainbridge Island, a co-worker put me in touch with a couple who had a room for rent in the basement of their home. it was furnished, cheap, and available immediately, meaning it was perfect for a broke and homeless fishing guide who was about to re-enter the real world. in one of my last email correspondences with the landlord before arriving, she mentioned that there was a pond on the property that she thought had some trout in it too. i was intrigued by this statement but questioned the validity of it. i arrived, moved in and found the pond.
shortly thereafter, i found its inhabitants.
the pond is maybe half an acre in size. according to the landlords, the pond has never been stocked, which would mean the cutthroat living in it now came are of a coastal variety, becoming landlocked some time ago. very cool. there are even rumors of salmon reaching the pond on spawning runs of the past.

i've got to know a handful of waters pretty well by visiting them often and i'll add this one to the list. it's a pleasure to get to know a water, and this pond is no exception. on windy days, the leaves and duck weed flow across the pond and back, opening and closing areas to cast to. sometimes on windless days, rise rings dimple the pond all day long.
the fish aren't the most sophisticated i have dealt with. to use a phrase of Keith's, the fish are very agreeable to most fly presentations. any small mayfly will work. hoppers will rise fish, but the fish have a hard time getting their jaws around bigger bugs. small streamers work well also.

picky eaters or not, they are very beautiful.
when i first arrived i was fishing with my 490. it obviously over-gunned the fish, but it was fun to launch 70 foot casts across the pond to risers. at some point it occurred to me to size down my stick. i was able to find a perfect tool at work, and i've had it on loan for a while now.
what fun. a fiesty, 11" native coastal cutthroat will put a good bend in a double-aught!

from my seat at my computing/tying/dining table, i have a perfect view of the pond. ducks frequent the pond, as does a heron. last week while James and i sat outside on my patio eating breakfast sandwiches, a blacktail stag walked out of the woods, down to the pond for a look, then continued on his way.
when the rises become too frequent to ignore or when i just feel like fishing, i grab the double-aught from its perch and in 50 steps or less, i'm there. i'm lucky to have the pond there. hopefully i'll get lucky again someday.

The Spawn is On

Coho all up in the Sol Duc:
Enlarge for full effect:

Cuttys enjoying the fruits of their labor:

I'll F*** With That!

I have been fishing the beaches a fair amount since moving to Bainbridge Island exactly two weeks ago. While I have had minimal success to date, I understand that part of the nature of this beach fishing game is just finding the fish. My collection of fishing spots is small, but growing, and I'm trying to learn which spots fish well at different tides, different times of day, etc. I've caught a handfull of cutthroat and silver salmon in the 4 - 6" class, which was fun the first two, maybe three times.

A day or two after I arrived on the Island, I received a message from an old friend from my hometown, Silas. He would be in Seattle for a conference and was staying through the weekend to fish and wondered if I would like to join him. Yes, I would, I told him and the plans were made. We rendez-vous-ed at perhaps the most unlikely place for two anglers to meet, a mall, and caught up while we made our way to one spot I know of that I had caught some small fish at before. No fish were caught that evening, but we knew we had an early morning outgoing tide waiting for us the next day.
We reached the beach the next morning before sunrise and made our way to a spot I found where a lagoon drains on the outgoing and a good flow of water passes by a little spit. I had caught a few nicer fish here earlier in the week but hadn't quite hit the tide right. This morning we timed it perfectly and we also had a huge tide that would drain most of the lagoon, giving us a solid two and a half hours of outgoing current.
With any foreign water or species, there are many questions and doubts that cross an angler's mind, especially when not catching fish. In this case, I was fairly confident that we were in a decent spot and that if the fish were around, they'd eat our flies - clousers in some combination of white, chartreuse, pink, olive and green. That said, I hadn't really gotten into them yet, so any theory I had to that point could be thrown out the window. We could philosophize about it all day, but in the end, fish certainly won't eat flies that aren't in the water so we started fishing.

Fifteen minutes or so into it, a strike.

The fish were there and they would eat our flies.

Between the two of us we landed a dozen or so before 9:00. It was the best luck I'd had since I arrived on the Island.

These coastal cutthroat are an awesome fish! Consider: a 14" coastal cutthroat will absolutely hammer a size 1 clouser minnow and fight hard enough to put a solid bend in an 8 weight, jump and spit your fly, take line off the reel and speed away when released! As Boone would say, I'll fuck with that! Finally getting into these fish let me get to know them a lot better and I'm thoroughly impressed.

When the tide finally slowed and the bite turned off, Silas and I began the walk back toward the car and breakfast. Walking and talking about the morning's great fishing we were suddenly stopped in our tracks by a huge splash and then a large cutthroat leaping two feet completely out of the air, directly in front of us, 60 feet away. Silas might have uttered "Dude...", but we looked at each other and in an instant ran into the water stripping line off our reels and false casting like madmen. I got one cast out pretty quick and the fly landed in the still-disappearing rings from the fish's splash. Nothing. I made another cast and started stripping when a yell from Silas came. I looked over and Silas was tight. His two casts were 10 or so feet to the left of the fish's jump and the fish had headed that way. It was quite a scene as we both couldn't contain ourselves and he battled the fish. It turned out to be the nicest fish we'd land that day.


From what I'm told, these fish push 18" and a 20" fish is a monster. So this healthy 16" fish was solid and put up a good fight.
The rest of the day was spent in search of new waters. Private Property and No Trespassing signs frustrated us as we made our way around the Sound. We found a few more places to fish and got into a few more fish, but nothing quite as productive as the morning. At any rate, I'm in. I've been used to frequent fishing for a while now so I think this will fit right in.
The day was also a great reunion with an old friend. Exploring new waters and new territory can be frustrating business sometimes and it definitely helps to have a positive face in the passenger seat and next to you on the water. Sometimes all you need is for someone else to tell you to take a right or a left. There are so many roads...
I've also heard there are salmon around.