After the first night in the yurt, I was up at 6:30. I slept well, but Josh had been up around 1 or so trying to pre-empt a migrane. The pressure had changed, as forecast, and I stood under the porch roof looking at a slight drizzle, thinking about a plan of attack for the morning. By the time I made some coffee, finished a bowl of cereal and wrote some notes from yesterday in the notebook, Josh was up and at ’em. Seriously. Good drugs. After he caught up on a cup of coffee, we elected to walk, no waders, down to the day-camping area and see if there was any action.
When we checked in the afternoon before, one of the park rangers told us about a couple likely places:
Down the hill from the back of the parking area across the street. I’ve never fished it, but I hear people have had some luck down there, he added. Taking this bit of stream intel with a grain of salt, we geared up and hustled down to the area he had described. I was immediately struck by the rugged beauty. The river was clear but dark with its copper, brown and gold stone bottom. The shore was crowded with boulders and red-branched bushes and thorns and sage. And as I looked further upstream, I could see that we hadn’t even made it into the canyon yet, the elevation climbing its rocky way to cliffs and cuts above both sides of the river. After a couple sunset-filled, fishless hours, and a realization that the wading prowess I had on the Fall was sorely inadequate on the Deschutes (read: splash & stumble), we decided it best to let the river rest and head back to camp for dinner.
I felt good about the rain. It was a change. A signal. I decided that if our luck was going to change, it was going to happen this morning. I wasn’t the only one who got that signal. Standing on the low grass bank shore about halfway down a forty yard pool, I watched the faster slip of current on the far side. I caught one little splash. Then another, lower in the pool. Another. A nice mayfly hatch was coming off. Little grey-brown shadows as light on the surface as air. Blue Winged Olive is a rain and cool temp hatch. I tied on a #14, pulled some line from my reel, paced a couple false casts for distance and laid the fly neatly at the head of the run. As I was getting ready to lay down my eighth cast, Josh hollered from the next pool down. I pulled my cast, put the rod down and ran down with my camera.
I returned to my pool. The fish were still rising. I cast again to the head of the pool, but while mending my line, the the fly skated about a foot across the surface and bang. I swear it was like that fly had touched the hot post on a truck battery or I had grabbed hold of an electric horse fence. After two full days of fishing without a bite, that 8″ rainbow was the pot of gold itself.
As my notebook says: Score.
I caught 7 or 8 more. Browns and rainbows. All on the same #14 BWO. All by skating it on the surface. Beat to hell and all cock-eyed, I clipped it off and sank its hook into the foam in my chest pack. A well earned retirement.
It was time to put on my waders. That canyon was calling.
We hiked a trail a 1/2 mile upstream before we decided to negotiate the boulders and brush below and try our luck. The water was bigger, faster and deeper here. The river far more narrow. Once in the water we picked our way over and around the back of the huge rocks that shoulder the steep shoreline. Thinking faster, deeper, I tied on an elkhair caddis with a copper john as a dropper fly. No dice. I climbed up on top of one of the rocks, lit my pipe and took a look around. The canyon was full-on here. Maybe 500 feet to the top of the red-stone cliffs, ponderosa pine, sage and giant, handful pine cones below. Perfect for big cats, I thought. Followed immediately by OK let’s think about something else there bossman.
The rain was down to a sprinkle now. A fish started rising in the pool below me. I tied on a new BWO, snuck back down behind the rock to a spot I could cast from and managed to get the timing of my fly’s drift in synch with the pace of his rises. I watched him lift from the shadow of a big rock on the bottom, rise to just under the fly, consider it for a fraction of a second, then grab, splash, fish on.
In the next pool up I saw another rise. Bigger splash in a strong chute at the head of a pool. But there was nothing on the surface. The bugs were in or below the surface now. I brought beat-to-hell and all cock-eyed out of retirement. Unable to stay upright or above water, my third cast dropped the waterlogged soldier at the head of the chute and under he went. Bingo.
We hiked and fished and caught fish and stopped counting. It felt like I had just translated some lost language. Around 5:45 dusk began its crawl into the canyon. I lit my pipe on the hike out. Tired, heart soaring and satisfied.