December on the Middle Fork Willamette River

The plan had been to fish one of the many great steelhead rivers that pour out of Oregon’s Coast Range mountains and spill into the sea. A cold, clear, dry December had kept the first big push of sea-run rainbows from entering the rivers. I had been watching the western sky doing a rain dance. But, as so often happens, once the rain came it just kept on coming relentlessly, pushing the coastal rivers past the point of productive fishing.

Instead, Gregg Hatten and I decided to use Hills Creek dam to our advantage and fish a Cascade river for trout. On flies. In December no less. While much of the country was digging out from the blizzard of 2009, we were drifting lazily down the Middle Fork Willamette. Now, by no means was the fishing off the charts but we did eke out a couple of healthy wild rainbows. Not bad at all bad for the second shortest day of the year.

Shea Catches First Salmon!

Recently, Shea and I took a charmed trip on the Oregon Coast, she caught her first salmon, we saw a western spotted skunk and as we rounded a corner talking about how nether of us had ever seen a bobcat what else should be in the road . . . .

The weather hadn’t been cooperating.  The fall rain had petered out and the winter rains were stalled somewhere out  over the Pacific.  We were getting blasted by a cold front and every morning I would check the western sky for signs of rain that wasn’t coming. 

I decided to get out fishing with Shea anyway, the urgency of the trip spurred on by the realization that she won’t be a kid forever and probably won’t want to spend any time with me very soon.  A few steelhead probably had moved in despite the low water, I’ve hooked bright salmon this time of year in that river and worse case scenario, I fiured we’d wrestle some darker salmon.  Hey, at least it wasn’t blown out. 

On the drive through the Coast Range mountains, I thought Shea’s silence meant boredom but she was just checking things out and it was really pretty out here. So far, so good. 

We reached the river, geared up and started fishing the first hole, a confluence of a creek and the mainstem river.  AA perfect bucket and a spot that produces fish for me more often than not.  Nothing.  The cold weather must’ve had any fish in the hole feeling sluggish.  We hurried on down to  the next spot, a hole that produces fish probably 8 times out of 10.  Not too shabby.

I breathed a sigh of relief as we pulled up and I saw that we were alone.  We should get something here.  I showed Shea where to cast  but I realzed the best thing would be to show her how I wanted her to fish.  What I doidn’t think was that I’d get a fish on my first cast, a little tomato of a coho that I tried to hand off and Shea wouldn’t take.  I let her fish alone for a while before starting to work the poo.l myself again.  Soon, the thumpity-thumpity of my lure was stopped by a familiar chompity-compity surge!  This time Shea did take the hand-off. 

Almost immeditely the rod tip went limp.    “Is he still there . . . Give me that . . . yeah, . ..  he’s still there.”  I handed the rod back to Shea but the fish came unbuttoned.  No big deal, I was sure there were more where those came from.  We worked our way upstream, fishing everywhere we had passed over before ending up at the first hole.  There I hooked a dark coho that I handed off to Shea and coached her through battle.  I tailed the salmon and we unhooked the fish and watched her swim off. 

I figured we should make our last stand where I had hooked the prvious two fish and that was when it happened.  Thinking she was snagged, Shea really laid it to the poor salmon that had eaten her lure.  Let’s just say it was solidly hooked.  She brought the fish to hand.  I tailed the fish and lifted it out of the water briefly to show it to her.  It was well hooked and I told her Iwas putting it back in the water to get the stil camera.  Well, as I did that,  she slipped and the fish went one way, the rod another and with a loud snap.  It was all over. 

As we packed up the last of everything into the truck I said, “Well, we lost a few lures today.”

“How many?”

“About sixty dollars worth.”

“Do you think it was worth it?  Sixty dollars?”  I smiled to myself.  It was worth a lot more than that.

Bartender Progress Report

Lately, what slowed my Bartender restoration progress down was the Swine Flu. It is tough to get work done laying on your back on your sofa. I haven’t been stuck at home during the week for years. Wow, ESPN can really drive something into the ground. I got better and borrowed a heat gun from a friend to aid in removing the fiberglass sheathing on the hull of the boat. The right tool definitely makes a difference:

Plugging away.

Halloween Propaganda

This Halloween I decided no one shall alight upon my porch without getting a bit of subliminal propaganda:

No Chinook Fishing: No Chinook Reports

Oregon Coast:  It has been a rough few years for chinook fishing.  The first year of the great collapse I only made a couple trips and caught five fish.  The second year of the collapse I hooked up every trip but only landed coho.  This year has been the toughest.  I haven’t caught anything, of course, I haven’t salmon fished at all.  Nada.  Not one trip. 

It has been difficult not salmon fishing.  It’s what I do and the salmon are a big part of the reason I want to stay in Oregon.  Salmon fishing is ingrained and wrapped up in my identity.  It’s who I am. 

But, the runs are still down.  They are up from where they were but still below escapement goals.  While ocean conditions are largely to blame for the recent precipitous collapse, angling pressure doesn’t help anything.  Ocean conditions show signs of improving but think of  this, the more smolts make it to sea, all things equal, the more adults return.  If we harvest fish now, the runs won’t bounce back as quickly or as high in the next few years as we dig out of this hole. 

If you do fish chinook this year, consider letting anything go that isn’t seriously chrome.  Consider catch and release fishing anyway.  But if you do fish and you do harvest, well, I’m not judging-it’s who we are after all. 

As for me, I might take a coho trip or two somewhere where we are allowed to fish for them.

Things Get Worse Before Getting Better: Restoring the Bartender

With my Man-Paradise complete I have been able to turn my attention again towards working on the boat . . . .

I drilled out the bungs and removed the mahogany trim and the gunwhale:

This was not easy, but a breaker bar and deadblow hammer did the trick.  The gunwhale is too far gone to be reused in any capacity. It will be replaced by new wood of a yet undetermined species.  White oak is relatively affordable, durable and available. 

As for the other trim, I have decided against using it as it was and instead I am going to use it for my windscreen. I think it will be a cleaner look and more importantly won’t trap water.  As it was, it collected water and I found an area of wet rot. I gouged the rot out and then sanded with a drum sander until I reached good wood:

I wanted to open up the rear bulkhead as well so I could se what was going on in there. That area is going to need a substantial rebuild:

I have begun removing the outer sheathing of fiberglass from the hull. The fir marine plywood is nice and of a quality you can’t readily buy anymore:

Removing the sheathing led to the discovery that there is wet rot in the spray rail.  So, my plan now is simply to replace the spray rail and battens in their entirety. We’ll see . . . . The plan has to constantly evolve. This brings me to a couple observations about restoration projects.

First of all, don’t get married to your plan or any particular pieces of wood. Your plan has to evolve as you discover new challenges. Secondly, I absolutely detest ringshank nails. Why anyone would use them in place of screws is beyond me. Needless to say, everything replaced will be adhered with screws, after all, they are removable.

The Story of ‘Serendipity.’ A free nineteen foot Bartender

Over the years I have had intermittent cravings for a boat to get me into the ocean, where all the salmon are bright and lingcod and halibut patrol the rocky reefs.  Seeing the damage Nate has been doing offshore turned this occaisonal craving to a full time obssession.  I have to get out there.

Just like with my drift boat, I decided I could get more boat for the money if I  custom built rather than  bought a production boat.  Now, what to build?  I knew I really wanted a Bartender, a seaworthy craft indigenous to the Pacific Nortwest designed to cross rough river bars and bring you home safely that even served as Coast Guard search and rescue boats in our waters for many years and have migrated to Australia and anywhere else with rough ocean conditions.

But, I also knew the Bartender would be expensive to build and I was looking for economy and settled on a Nexus Planing dory.  Built in an open configuration it would be economical to build.  Being of very limited offshore experience I checked in with the crew at Wooden Boat Forum to get their thoughts and explained my intended uses.  Now, I added as a caveat that no one should mention the Bartender. 

Well, someone mentioned that they knew where there was a Bartender, that had never been finished and was free to a good home and would I be interested?  Yes, I might be interested.  We corresponded for a few weeks and I received these daunting images:

But, the gentleman assured me that for the price, the boat was in excellent condition and as far as he could tell had no major defects, meaning rot. I decided to go for it and cruised down to San Francisco, spending the night with old friends before venturing further south to Santa Cruz where I bought a cheap trailer that ended up fitting the boat perfectly.

The next stop was the Davenport Mill to actually extract the boat from where it had been stored upside down for about twenty years. It was quite a chore to get the hull out but with some finessing and finageling she was on the trailer by the early afternoon:

Tragically, the trailer winch was discovered to be defect so I had to head back to Santa Cruz and buy a new one. After a few hours of dealing with those logistics I was ready at 6:30 pm for the long road home and therein was a problem: did I drive the long road home through the night or stop somewhere short of home? In the end I elected to drive the whole way. A couplke fitful hours of sleep in the Ram didn’t seem like they would help much.

I got home at 7:30 am, slept for a couple hours and got right to work cleaning up the boat. I scrubbed the exterior for sanity’s sake and she didn’t look horrible anymore:

Next I turned my attention to the interior of the hull and even that didn’t look to shabby with a bit of elbow grease:

Unfortunately but understandably, Shelly put the kabosh on any chemical work in the garage and I was sent scrambling for a suitable shop, aka Man-Habitat in which to work. I got lucky again, finding that my coworker had just purchased a country property that had been foreclosed. The shop neeed a ton of work but would be free to me if I cleaned it up. The previous owner had a metal shop there and his disposal technique involved dumping steel cuttings and slag on the ground. I had to clean that up-it wasn’t exactly tire friendly:

The slag piles and steel made gravel and stone seem light. I removed it half a bucketload at a time and loaded the Ram down. You know you are dealing with some nasty stuff when employees at the dump question what you are up to but ultimately the supervisor gave me the go ahead. Next, I brought in a couple cubic yards of gravel to cover the cleared section and bury any tire mauling steel scraps I might have missed, overloading the Ram with one yard per trip and fretting the whole way in. But, she performed like a champ and the shop was ready to receive the boat:

So now, I am done working on the shop to work on the boat and now am again in the process of restoring the boat. I removed some trim that was too far gone and the port gunwhale:

The boat is mostly solid but I plan on replacing all or nearly all the frames to be on the safe side as well as rebuilding the motor well and reglassing the hull . Other than that, it is a matter of custom finishing the boat exactly how I want her. By next salmon season I hope to be trolling the open ocean.

Fighting for the Future of the Mckenzie: Hatchery or Wild? You Make the Call.

It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people. Earnest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises.

He could have just as well been describing fish managment on the Mckenzie for the last three generations and maybe I just need a few drinks and then a couple more. We’ve been abusing the river and pretending like we care–all the while avoiding facing the inevitable.  We’ve pushed our native trout to the brink between Hayden Bridge and Forest Glenn-a majority or nearly so of the mainstem in the famed Mckenzie River.

Reknowned as the spawning grounds of the driftboat, we used to be a destination fishery. Some of the West’s first fishing guides made their livings here. Presidents used to fish here every summer . . . . Obama took up the fly rod in Montana.

Many still refuse to recognize that there is a problem, like addicts who only care about their short term fix. You can catch fifty hatchery trout and be asked, “what did you do after lunch?” But when a resource declines and the powers that be show little or inclination to fix it, conflict is unavoidable.

This conflict has been brewing underneath the surface of the Mckenzie River where our native trout population has declined to alarmingly low levels in the “sacrifice zone,” so described aptly by our Regional ODFW Fish Biologist.

In the local anglers’ collective consciousness, those who get it anyway, a sense of dissatisfaction has been growing, a nagging feeling that fishing could be better, hell, should be better on the Mckenzie River if only it was managed better . . . . If only one hundred and forty thousand hatchery trout weren’t dumped on top of our native fish, crowding them out of limted habitat and gobbling up finite food resources. If only bait fishing wasn’t allowed. If only certain vested interests weren’t standing in the way of progress . . . .

The underlying issue gurgled to the surface when Matt Stansberry of our local Mckenzie-Upper Willamette Trout Unlimited chapter and Chris Daughters, owner of the Caddis Fly Angling Shop published an opinion piece in the Register Guard suggesting it is time to start managing the Mckenzie for wild trout. This is hardly a radical notion. Montana and Washington don’t stock their moving waters with resident trout and Oregon, despite its green reputation is way behind on this issue.

Unsurprisingly, the Mckenzie River Guides Association came out in opposition to the proposal in a counter piece in the Register Guard. In case you don’t want to actually read this piece here are some highlights:

Stansberry and Daughters declare that the section from Blue River to Leaburg Lake is a “sacrifice zone” due to the number of hatchery-reared trout released in this section of river. This reach of the McKenzie would be more appropriately labeled as “multiple use,” or an area for sharing, available to all citizens — young and old alike, regardless of skill level or income. It’s a place where all types of anglers can enjoy a river trout fishing experience.

In this technological world where the general population is disconnecting with the outdoors and natural experiences at an alarming rate (see Richard Louv’s 2005 book “Last Child in the Woods”), having sections of the McKenzie River where anglers are allowed to catch and consume hatchery fish could very well be what preserves the “redsides!” It is heartwarming for us to see a family in a drift boat with youngsters excited by the real prospect of catching a trout. These are tomorrow’s sportsmen, sportswomen and conservationists. As opportunities for this type of outdoor experience decline statewide, angling pressure will likely increase in those areas that allow harvest.
 
To their credit, the MRGA wants to see bait banned between Goodpasture Bridge and Forest Glen. Bait hooked trout have a fifty fifty shot of surviving a release whereas flies caught on lures survive about twently four of twenty five times. But the Guides Association is plain wrong on the hatchery trout issue.

For one, the term sacrifice zone was not coined by Stansberry or Daughters. It is a quote from our ODFW biologist. Nitpicking aside, we all agree that it is a good idea to get kids outdoors.  The area of disagreement is about what we teach them once we get them out there.

Do we teach them to live beyond their means? That the river is just a vessel to fulfill their selfish desire for a fishstick? Do we teach them to ask the river to give more than it is capable of?

Or . . .

Do we teach them to live within their means? Do we teach them to harvest only where and when such harvest is sustainable?

I know where I stand on those issues and the put and take fishery on the Mckenzie is out of step with the growing consensus that we should utilize natural resources in a sustainable manner.

Regarding the shared resource issue, the wild trout areas cited by the Guides Association are located either in the lower river, where extensive private property basically limits access to those of us with boats or in the swift and violent upper river, where the trout holding areas are accessable only to boats and those boats better be manned by highly skilled oarsmen–or else. I can fish there. Actually, I can watch people fish there. I have to be on the oars. But the old, the young, people without boats . . . sorry.

So, I ask this: Where’s our share? Where is our fair opportunity for the young and old, people of all incomes to catch native trout in the Mckenzie River? The current managment regime denies many that opportunity in the most highly accessible and productive area of the river. It needs to change.

There seems to be an idea that the river couldn’t sustain a fishery without the hatchery trout. This is not true. The science coudn’t be more clear:

“Fall wild populations of two-year-old and older brown and rainbow trout increased 159% and 868% in number and 160% and 1016% in total biomass respectively, four years after the last catchable-sized hatchery rainbow trout was stocked in the Varney section of the Madison river . . . [W]ild rainbow trout biomass levels were still showing increases four years after the last stocking. Wild brown and rainbow trout between 10.0-17.9 inches showed the greatest increases when stocking ceased . . . . “ (’The Effects of Stocking Catchable-Sized Hatchery Trout on Wild Trout in the Madison River and O’Dell Creek, Montana.’ E. Richard Vincent of the Montana Department of Fish and Wildlife, 1982.)

If we stop stocking the Mckenzie within four years it is likely that the number of wild rainbow trout will increase by up to 1100% and biomass may increase by as much as 1175%. I have combined the increases for browns and rainbows found in the Montana study as our Mckenzie fish do not have to compete with brown trout. With 11 times as many wild fish and 12 times the biomass with the largest increase in trout between 10 and 17.9 inches, I think children and people of all ability levels could still have an enjoyable experience without stocking.

But we don’t have to go to Montana for success stories. The Metolius is an example of an Oregon fishery that has taken off once stocking ceased. The Deschutes trout population absolutley exploded in the absence of competition from hatchery trout. Sadly, ODFW seems disinclined to learn from its past successes.

If you wonder why we care, some of it is simply for the sake of the fish. But there is also the angler in me who wants to catch more and bigger wild trout. Guiding or fishing the river I can tell instantly whena native is on the line. The speed and power are the giveaways. Anemic stocked trout simply struggle weakly. Even if you don’t fish take a look at these pictures and ask yourself what you would rather catch:

Native Mckenzie River Trout:

Hatchery Trout:

Native Trout:

Hatchery Trout:

Native Trout:

Hatchery Trout:

Native:

Seems pretty obvious doesn’t it.

Scouting Mission: Mckenzie River Two-Fly Tournament

Thursday, Rick Allen and I ran the upper Mckenzie from Mckenzie Bridge to Forest Glenn. It was a wild, rollicking, tecnhical ride as usual. The river in that section surges and squeezes around and over boulders almost never pausing to catch its breath as it races relentlessy towards the valley. A couple rapids are simply really long cataracts of whitewater with no clear line. You just go for it.

And the fish . . . . They don’t stock up there and the trout are wild and powerful. As the oarsman I don’t get to fish. The river is too swift for any such shenanigans. The strategy is to cast your flies into any softer water you can find as you drift, no, are pulled downriver. Rick caught a nice trout and hooked and lost another.

Like I said, the purpose of the trip was to scout the river for the Mckenzie Two-Fly tournament. The tournament is a charity event put on by Mckenzie-Upper Willamette Chapter of Trout Unlimited and the The Caddis Fly Angling Shop. This years proceeds will again go to the Mckenzie River Trust’s work on Green Island, this time helping remove a road that interferes with the floodplain dynamics of an important side channel that hosts 100% native species. That’s right, no invasives allowed!

You didn’t think the photos were going to show the fly did you?

Fly Line Deck Done! Sort of . . ..

It’s fishable. The deck and brace have been fabricated, sanded sealed and installed. I’m going to have to remove everthing and take it apart one more time to really get the horns solid. I slapped it back together for a guide trip. But the new carriage bolts are not, repeat, are not going to let the deck go flying out of there again.