Mckenzie flyfishing and the incongruous blizzard of April 20, 2008

Ok, it wasn’t a blizzard but still was a seasonal regression and shock to my system when I awoke for the Mckenzie-Upper Willamette Trout Unlimited outing on Sunday morning and found my truck and boat looking like this:

Snow.  On April 20.  This might be normal in some places but for us it is the latest snowfall in over 50 years. Still, we had a plan and tempting though it may have been to stay warm and cozy at the homestead TU 678 had a new, recently committed recruit and it wasn’t the time to come off looking like fair weather fishers.  I couldn’t find my floatant as I gathered the last of the gear but looking outside it didn’t seem like much of an issue.

We met at Armitage, set up the shuttle and then headed upstream to Hayden Bridge.  In my boat, it was me and Brent (our newest member) and in the other boat some of the old-guard (Mattand Todd).  We floated downriver with no action at all earlyish.  The snow was melting off the hills (it still wasn’t exactly a heat wave) and undoubtedly bringing the river temperature down. The weather was tempestuous.  Alternating between hailing, raining, the occaisonal 30 mph sustained winds broadsiding the driftboat trying to blow us sideways upstream (sometimes it took all my strength just to keep the bow into the breeze and us heading downstream) and yes, even cold but welcome sunshine, it defied characterization.  I’m guessing now but the high couldn’t have topped the mid-40’s but for a few minutes and the wind chill made it feel about 30 at times.  The only upside to the weather was the gore-tex hatch subsided almost as much as the caddis.

We picked up some small cutthroat in a riffle on the bottom and a few more small to very small fish on top.  Some March Browns would come off in those wonderful and welcome moments when the sun peeked through the clouds but the caddis had gone into hiding. Near the end of the drift we anchored up in a sweet spot and on the first couple casts Brent came up with this pretty nice native redside:

A few minutes later he came up with this good native cutt:

We stuck it out, found what we were looking for declared victory and got off the water pretty quickly.