Hey adecadelost....Well, here it is...hit the flows on the holiday monday today with the girlfriend and my buddy and had a really great day...
This little venture out to the vedder was more like a part 2 to last weeks trip...last week my friend and I had fished the canal, and various lower to mid river pools with limited success, and so this week the girlfriend tagged along with us, and we decided to start at the upper river under a watchful moon...
It was a crisp and cold morning to start...glad I brought the thermals today...and my patience. Holiday mondays can be just about the worst time to hit the vedder, especially when the water levels are so very low, and fishing spots are so limited...but I was still confident we could find water that was isolated and uncrowded with a decent chance at a coho or two...so we arrived at the upper river with a brief stop in at the hatchery to view the spawning channels and give the girlfriend a little crash course on identifying fish...there were quite a few fish in the channels, mostly coho, with a few springs mixed in...
We then hiked down from our parking spot at about the cement block and fished pocket water until I found a nice little pool with a good trench down the middle of it that NOBODY WAS FISHING! I told the girl that this looked very promising and she immediately scurried down the slope to the rivers edge....
Now, some background info is necessary here, my girlfriend is new to this whole river fishing thing but she loves this kind of stuff, so I have been showing her the ropes so to speak...She's using a little Trophy XL centerpin on a nice lightweight shimano drift rod and is starting to cast it really, really well!!! She's also working on watching the water to spot fish, and read the bottom structure to identify good holding areas, etc...
Well she wasn't too optimistic, but I had her short floating tiny little roe sacs through the trench and sure enough she hooks into a tiny, but manageable, chum salmon for her first ever salmon and plays it quite well until this little doe throws the hook with some acrobatics...now my girlfriend is really keen, and you can tell her intensity level has stepped it up a notch...
next she gets into a little jack spring that was surprisingly clean for that high up river under these low water conditons, but she loses it as well when it swam in between some rocks and wedged her line in tight...by now she was beaming, she really had the nack for this down pat, she was sharp! Nice controlled drifts, no flossing or float dragging, just clean short floated presentations that were rewarding her quite well...
By now she was even getting cocky about the hole fishing thing...and meanwhile I hook into really nice clean white spring, big and almost chrome...I was even more shocked at how clean it was than I was the one my girlfriend hit... well needless to say the girlfriend wants to get a shot of me playing and landing a fish - showing her how its done, so to speak...and well my little 8 lb leader pops after quite a spirited fight...and she pipes up at me and says that she wouldn't have lost it!!!! Here's the look I gave her...
...and my reply was very simply, after lunch we are going to hike into some pools where I know very few people will be fishing, and conditions aren't going to be so easy as they are here, dear 8) , so then we'll see how well you do... :wink:
I want to make special mention to a young boy named Travis that I met today as well...I showed him how to get his snags undone without spooking the fish and then showed him a good spot to short float in and tried and hopefully succeeded in explaining to him how short floating not only prevents future snags, but also doesn't spook the fish if you miss a hook set, or bump a nice fresh coho with you pencil lead...he shortly after that hooked a nice little jack spring, short floating with great skill...nicely done my man! Well, on with the story...
After a brief lunch up by the cement block, and a nice chat with a young guy who had a hatch coho on the beach, we decided to head down towards some pools in the mid river...
There were crowds around, but not in the nice little run I had in mind...the only problem was we were going to fish it from the side that was toughest to cast from...and I mean tough. The three of us were right up against a wall of rocks and dirt and trees with no room for a back swing to cast with... so I taught the girl all about the little flip / tight quarters cast that works well under these conditons, and by the time I was into my first fish, she was slinging that setup right out to the perfect little slot with no difficulty and dropping her presentation right down into the run like a pro!!! I cannot possibly express how awesome it was to see her pull off this technique so soon after being shown how, man was I proud!!!!!!! She didn't manage to get any to the beach, but I know that is just a matter of time...next lesson will be on some of the subtle nuances to playing a fish on the centerpin...
She hooked into several springs, some jacks, some mature...as did I and my friend bubba, but all were quite dark and similar to this one bubba is holding up before release....the cleanest we saw all day, were those mentioned earlier and I think those were an exception to the typical condition of fish in the upper river.
The nitty gritty of the report is fairly simple...In that last pool I was in I saw two very nice coho break water in nice clean jumps that left no mistake they were coho and in very good shape...but the coho are few and far between to say the least, and finding them, right now is the hardest part. Those were the only two I spotted in the river all day. I suspect I lost one in that pool on a small brass blade that was so short floated it was almost not in the water, but the fish did not show itself and was off in under a minute of some coho like thrashing about so it was impossible to know for sure...
If you are going to fish the vedder river under these low water conditons, carefully choose your spots, as the coho are isolated and the real key is finding them, otherwise you will likely only hook springs and chum most of the day.
Fish away from the springs and chum, short float with determination, and you will not waste as much time playing out fish that should be left alone. Not to mention you'll likely be more successful at locating and even catching some of these low water, overly harrassed coho that have thus far managed to run the gauntlet of rods on the vedder right now. There are a few in there, and more to come with our much needed rainy season...but keep in mind, crowds of people on a pool is not a good sign of coho!!!!!!!!!!! In fact I would stay away from these spots, as many of the techniques used by novices here will more than likely spook coho and deter them from taking your presentation....fish spots away from crowds of people thrashing the water with viscious hook sets and scaring the scales off your targeted prey... your chances of success will likely improve dramatically. Now that I have done my first couple good exploratory trips of the year, I will be waiting for the rain, but that's not to say success cannot be had with persistence and good technique...
Good luck to you!
Rib
(PS: For those fine fishermen here who already know the truth in the last paragraph....pass it on.)
