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Life at the Lake

a diary of living on a small lowland lake

Lake Ketchum under a newly risen moon

Robert C. Arnold

INTRODUCTION

Fishing with the sunk line (generally, done dead drift) is much the same the world over, whether you are fishing for Atlantic salmon in New Brunswick, big browns in Upstate New York, brookies in Labrador, rainbows in the UP of Michigan, black-spotted cutthroats in Montana, or sea-going trout in New Zealand or Argentina. Most of my adult life I’ve fished for steelhead, trout, and salmon (and in that order of importance) in the Western United States. It has been mainly with the sunk line.

In the beginning, I fished exclusively for trout. You might say that trout are there for us to hone our basic wet-fly skills on, but in the process we come to love and respect them, all in themselves. They still occupy an important niche in my mind when it comes to thinking about going fishing. I suspect that, in my old age (which is coming on, fast), a man who has fished long and hard for large anadromous fish may well return to trout and the subtle satisfactions involved in catching them. It has been the case with many.

Though fishing with a floating line and a fly that rides on or just under the surface is probably the most pleasant way to fish, it is with the sunk line that most Western anglers go after trout, steelhead, and salmon, usually in a river, most of the year. Hence, in this book I will be mostly concerned with fish found there. The river habitat is extremely important because it is where all wild salmonids are spawned, hatched, reared as fry and fingerlings, and some become smolts there before going back to the sea. If something goes wrong in the river environment, all is lost, including the fish, and much that is pleasurable and important in our life will disappear for good. That deterioration is happening all around us today.

So, besides looking at methods for catching fish with a sunk line, I will be closely examining what happens to the river environment during its seasonal shifts and changes, and what harm civilization has done by putting commercial uses ahead of protection. This is important for the fisher to know about because it directly effects whether or not our fishing will be successful, and what tactics and techniques will best catch big fish, and I hope lead to their release afterwards.

Our Western rivers are blessed with many species of salmonids and it is possible to catch them all on the sunk line. (But not all of them, all of the time, you understand.) If we box the year, the way a mariner boxes his compass, we find hatchery steelhead peaking in January and the first of the wild fish returning to those rivers lucky enough to still have any left. As the hatchery run expires, the wild fish become a proportionately larger part of the catch, and the hatchery fish will have spawned or been caught out of the run and some survive as scrawny kelts or downrivers, as they are sometimes called. Only about sixteen percent of the wild run will survive after spawning long enough to replenish themselves and return for a second time. Even that small a number is amazing, considering how battered and wasted they become. Oddly, the spawning process is harder on the males, or bucks, and it is their corpses you will often find along a streambed in late winter or spring. You’d think it would be the females.

In some streams, spring Chinooks ascend now and so do a special breed of later-winter steelhead that seem mysteriously to increase its numbers, then alarmingly give them up in a manner that does not seem to be hinged to our successfully catching these wonderful fish, since they are almost always fished for on a catch-and-release basis. Yet they too are disappearing in recent years. Different rivers have springs, summers, and falls, and Chinook seem to sort themselves out geographically and there is little overlapping. Chinooks in most river systems are classified as either threatened or endangered, and stringent fishing regulations are either in effect or soon will be. In Puget Sound, where I live, the situation is so serious that a general closure in both fresh and saltwater is in the process of being enacted, along with stringent land-use regulations to protect their remaining habitat. The cobbled streambed in which they spawn is disappearing fast, along with the deep pools required for them to ripen and await spawning time. If attention had been paid to the mounting problem a decade or two ago, such draconian measures might not need to be taken today.

In the rivers where I fish, there are wild winter, wild spring, and (most wonderful of all) wild summer steelhead, the last of which are becoming extinct in the United States. When I first started springtime fishing for them, there was a river closure long in effect, largely to protect the descending smolts, but for a couple of decades now most rivers have minimum keep-size established at twelve or fourteen inches, for seldom do smolts get that big, and are open to fishing; additionally, the banning of bait in the spring has protected the actively feeding and vulnerable smolts, and fishing has been permitted for the larger fish. Things have now changed back to the original reduced-population configuration, and a springtime fishing ban is in effect in many rivers--this time to protect the adults from incidental hooking, even from release-type fishing, since their numbers have been so strangely and suddenly decimated.

Summer steelhead have the deserved reputation for taking the fly well, especially on the surface, but the truth is that most anglers still fish the deeply sunk fly for them nearly all the time. In fact, I know some accomplished fishers who have never hooked a summer run on a floating fly and line, and each year, some hot July day, go through the perfunctory exercise of a morning’s fishing in this manner, then return in the afternoon and fish in their old ways, with the deeply sunk wet fly, thoroughly discouraged. I mention this mainly to illustrate how important the sunk fly is to many fishers. It is because it consistently catches fish for them, year-round.

In the fall come a succession of salmon--Chinooks, followed by coho, then chum. (They also go by the names of kings, silvers, and dogs, respectively.) In odd-numbered years there are the humpies, or pinks. With them, though many have been in and out of the river throughout the year, are dolly vardens and bull trout, which are closely related but now recognized as distinct sub-species. They are ravenous feeders and recover quickly from their own spawning and become beautiful, bright, and pink-meated again. Also in the fall the sea-run cutthroats arrive, a true trout and insect feeder that is always on the lookout for food. Find them and they will take a fly readily. And some streams, such as my North Fork of the Stillaguamish, have a tiny run of what is popularly called creek sockeyes--salmon that have no connecting lake in which to spawn and rear their brood, but somehow manage to hang on; they are noticeable in a stream because they are small and brilliant red.

All of these fish will take a sunk fly, though not all of them readily, nor most of the time. And when they have ascended a river to sections near their spawning beds, they become pugnacious and are often fished for with wet fly in a manner that snags them. It is probably best that no fishing be allowed when this is the situation, for the fish need every bit of reserve energy to complete their spawning and hooking them in whatever manner depletes their strength and may lead to an early death. Even if regulations permit continued fishing for them, it is time to quit targeting these species and go elsewhere.

Sunk-fly fishing for steelhead, salmon, and large trout is about the only productive method nine or ten months out of the year. From late October until late May or early June the sunk fly (and line) are king. Mastery of the principles of fishing this way are easily learned and will serve the angler well. Most books on the subject address themselves to how to make or buy lines that will sink to various depths. My intention is not to repeat this readily available information but to discuss what takes place on a river when you are out on a river, searching for fish and enjoying the day. To me this is what lies at the heart of going fishing. It deserves a more detailed examination.

Most of the year in cold water fish are not very active. Some days they will move a considerable distance to take a fly, but it is best not to fish as though they will do this. Instead, you must practice what anglers mean when they talk about "hitting the fish in the face with the fly." This is based on the premise of a number of fish are scattered throughout a run that has a good current and a depth that varies between about four and eight feet. If the fly is thrown and presented to them enough times, the law of averages indicates it will soon pass close to a resting steelhead. The fish either takes the fly or it doesn't.

When we are lucky (or skillful) the fish grabs the fly and we have a hook up; with a bit of good fortune we land the fish. This makes us happy and successful. If the fish evades the fly it may become alarmed and go elsewhere. Usually we do not know this, and continue to fish on as before. But sometimes in low water there is a person up on the bank spotting the pool and he gives us a clue to what's happening by calling out, "Your fish is gone. You're wasting your time continuing to cast over this spot." And we move on, or else we would have moved on anyway, for the accepted way of fishing is by moving on down through the run.

This is called "step-fishing," and it is a methodical way of covering lie water and working your way thorough it systematically. We continued stepping downstream a yard or two at a time and casting until we have a hook-up with a fish or, as chances have it, reach the end of the run without any action and exit the pool. All the while we are able to observe what is going on around us and enjoy the day. We fish mechanically, thinking little about what we are doing and performing our ritual act of throwing out the fly, fishing out the cast, retrieving the fly, and flinging it out again, which we do almost automatically.

I think we ought to think more about what we are doing and the inherent limitations of our method.

To do this we first need to look more closely at the watery world around us. We need to understand as much as it is possible about how rivers behave and what they are comprised of.

Rivers vary and how we fish them should, too, as we adapt our approach to what meets our eyes and our expectations. This is called "reading the water" and lies at the heart of all fishing. It helps to explain why and how certain experienced fishers will walk right on by a pool that is being flogged by less knowledgeable fishers. The knowing one "reads" the water and decides it is not suitable for holding steelhead or salmon, at least not under the existing conditions. (Raise the river six inches, or drop it by that much, and it might be.)

The angler is "thinking like a steelhead," or trying to, since it is impossible to do so, though there is a group that believes it can be done. So let’s give it a brief try. It is not difficult to imagine yourself a steelhead and to look around you (on the surface of the river, admittedly) and try to visualize where you would lie in a given piece of water. Normally a steelhead will not lie in a great, roaring riffle or cataract, nor in still water that is very deep. It will select something more to its taste, which is water that runs along at about the pace that a man in a hurry might be walking. The depth will be from three to six feet, perhaps a little more or less. Steelhead take up lies in water as shallow as ten or twelve inches if nobody is around and nothing disturbs them, but they are quick to flee when their solitude is violated or any noise is transmitted down the riverbank and to the substrate, which is the river bottom. Most often they lie deeper, though not actually on the bottom. Occasionally they will surprise you by being found lying well up in the water column, as scientists call it.

What do we look for when we "read water"? The same four things steelhead or large trout do:

1. A bottom that has stones that will disguise them and make them nearly invisible, with their smoky-grey backs and slim configuration adding to the deception. (This doesn't mean they won't lie over sand, as many anglers believe they won’t, for they will, but they really don't like it and become extra spooky there, quick to flee or scatter.)

2. Good water speed. They prefer fast water to slow, any day of the week, so long as it is not too fast. They will tolerate very fast water for brief periods, usually only when moving from one reach to another, for it is what they must pass through, and the river abounds with it. They move upstream late in the day, as dark approaches, and early in the morning, as it recedes. Of course they sometimes move during the daytime, too, especially when the water is high or discolored, but not so often.

3. A seam, or place where two different speeds of water come together and provide a differential of currents. This is what steelhead usually seek, and you should, too.

4. Cover or shade. Obviously shade is more important in times of low water or bright sun, but in a cold, winter river cover and a handy place to flee when danger threatens is important, too, and steelhead and other large salmonids seek it out every time. It may take the form of an overhanging bank or a deep pocket near a boulder in a flow that is uniform and otherwise unvarying, or under the shadow of a tree that overhangs the river.

Reading a river and searching for clues revealed by the current is a pleasurable activity, all in itself, and can be performed routinely, even when one is on a picnic with one's wife and children. The fisher can always plan to return to the water later and fish it, if it "reads" well. One pool on the Wenatchee took me three years to get back to after I first saw it and I had no idea of how it would fish until I gave it a try. It was excellent. My reading only gave me a clue and was no substitute for the real experience, which is always different. Often the try will prove monumentally disappointing.

An angler reads water much as a bibliophile goes through a heap of books. Even while driving along the highway, when he comes to a bridge the angler reads the reach above and below the bridge, all within the few seconds it takes him to cross to the other side. He does the best he can.

Depending on the kind of trip he is on and whether he likes what he sees, he may hit the brakes, pull over to the shoulder, suit up, and go fish. Or the glimpse may tell him to keep on driving. The trip continues and the search goes on.

But always he is reading water. When he draws a glass from the kitchen tap, he may study the flow and measure its velocity. As the author of A River Runs Through It tells us, he is "haunted" by water. It is a strong image and a good one. Norman Maclean doesn't bother to tell us the water must be running. You have to read the book or else see the movie to know it and why.

How do you learn how to read water? Good question. Analysis is the beginning point. You must learn to use your eyes. Hydrologists define a healthy river as one that has "a pool/riffle" configuration. This tells us everything and nothing.

A river alternates its pools and riffles. You may not have noticed this before. It is the key to understanding. First there is the one, then the other. What is more, the river alternates its cutbank side. A cutbank is nothing more than where the current erodes the land on the side opposite from what is called the wading bar or beach, which is generally made up of cobbles. (The English call this shingle, and it is a nice word.) As a river drops from its winter high, the bar is said to "emerge." This means it grows larger, as more and more of the cobbles on the bar side are left high and dry. Cobbles are also called substrate, though usually not when it is dry. The exposed bar is where non-fishers like to go for a walk on a summer's day. And it is great for beach fires.

The pool/riffle configuration is nothing more than your basic geology at work. A river's job is to claim land by cutting into the steep side of its bank and creating meanders. An "old" river is one that has done a nearly complete job of undercutting its banks and has formed a series of wide S-curves in its channel. (Sometimes these are called oxbows.) In doing so, it has slowed its course almost to a stop. A river becomes old nearest to its mouth because the terrain is usually flat and more subject to being overcome with meanders; towards its headwaters, its terrain is steeper, the meanders more difficult for the river to manufacture.

Whenever a river starts to claim a bank that is deemed important, engineers panic and bring in quarry rock and riprap it. This is so valuable land won't be lost by a landowner with political clout and, perhaps, plenty of money. A riprap effects the river downstream from where it is installed, obviously, but not so apparent is the fact that a riprap effects a river upstream from where it is installed. There are water-quality experts and river scientists who don't believe this or understand the principles at work.

My point is only that a pool/riffle configuration, alternating each and also changing sides of the river on which the highbank exists, is normal and natural--the sign of a healthy river. A fisher reading an unknown river will soon spot the location of the channel, that is, the part of the river where the current flows the fastest. This is done by reading the surface of the river and looking for signs. Always the fastest part is where a major slick or vee-groove forms. It may be on the observer's side or farther out. Almost always it is near the side where the cutbank is. To put it a different way, if you are standing on the bar or beach side of the river, the channel is most likely more than halfway toward the far bank, which is steep, or anyway steeper than it is on the side where you have waded.

A fisher who wades a river usually starts out from the bar or beach side and strides out into the graduated shallows and fishes toward the deep or cutbank side. This is your basic steelhead and salmon drifting and step-fishing situation. If he is wearing hip boots, he can wade only so deep--usually to within an inch or two of the tops of his boots, which tend to sag and admit water; I know many fishers who routinely wade over the tops of their hip boots, yet they will not buy waders. Perhaps they like the shock to the system cold water brings on a warm day. Not me.

Similarly, a fisher wearing waders and entering the water from the bar side will walk right out until he is standing waist-deep in the river, as near to the channel as he can get. His fishing vest routinely gets soaked, especially the lower pockets where he houses his flyboxes. Even though he knows the hooks will rust he continues to wade deep and forgets to dry out the boxes at the end of the day. Soon he will need to tie more flies.

Fishers make their throws toward the channel or across it, aiming for the far bank. They do this because they think it is where the steelhead and salmon will lie. Often they are right. But many times they are wrong and they have waded out on top of the fish and have scattered them. Don't worry: they will soon return, but probably not until you have moved on.

I say the river has a pool/riffle configuration and the fisher concentrates on the pools. But some pools are fast and shallow and resemble riffles, though deeper by definition. And some riffles have pockets or small deep stretches within their swiftness, and fish can be found there, too, especially in low water when the temperature is warm. These lies have more oxygen than the slower, deeper pools, which by now are growing stagnant. So when I say the experienced fisher concentrates on the pools, not the riffles, there are exceptions. These should be noted and acted upon.

Since a river alternates both its cutbank sides, and its pools and riffles, the fisher finds he has to cross the river repeatedly to reach water that can be entered from its shallow side and fished towards its deep. This happens with nearly every pool. It is another good reason to wear waders instead of hip boots, no matter how hot the day. Not to be able to cross a river to reach the next pool shortens the fishing day and reduces by half or more the chances of getting a good fish.

If a healthy river alternates its pools with riffles frequently, and in a manner than is beautiful to behold, a wasted river does not. It becomes ugly. This is what has happened to my favorite stream, the North Fork of the Stillaguamish, as a result of many factors, logging the chief one of them. First, the Forest Service overcut on its land, busily financing roads at the public expense for the logging companies, which it believed it had a duty to serve. When its own fish biologist pointed out to them that their logging had destroyed fish habitat and a rare race of wild summer steelhead was threatened with extinction, they deliberated and then halted all logging. It was a wise and prudent decision, however late arriving.

On state and private lands no ban was enacted, not even when a horrendous slide on Department of Natural Resources land poured a zillion tons of sand and silt into DeForest Creek, then into Deer Creek, next into the North Fork, and finally into the main Stillaguamish River and Port Susan in Puget Sound.

This is not news, merely the background on how this fine river lost its pool/riffle configuration and incidentally gave me an opportunity to observe at first hand what a ruined river looks like. I is simply awful, resembling a slate-colored highway more than a normal river. There is neither pool nor riffle but some kind of crossbred creation, the river running fast its full, shallow length. You can locate a pool or a riffle only from memory. You wait for the river to clear after each rain or snowmelt, and time passes slowly. But the river does not clear. When this condition persists, the fish-breeding and -rearing habitat of the river is destroyed. Not only is it ugly to look at, but it has lost its capacity to produce fish. Its spawning substrate is choked with silt, its clouded water supportive of little insect life on which young fish feed.

After almost a decade of such abuse, with logging reduced but not halted anywhere except on Forest Service land, the river began to recover a little. Its pool-riffle configuration is returning and the bottom throughout its length is showing some stretches of rocks again. The fish population of Deer Creek--almost destroyed--is recovering slightly.

A similar situation occurred in the North Fork above the mouth of Deer Creek. A full section (one square mile) of steep, unstable private land was clearcut far upstream and a slide (or mass-wasting event) took place; all the upstream pools were filled with sand and peagravel. Wading bars appeared in the middle of the river, instead of where the angler normally waded on the bar side, after each high water and the river precipitated out its bedload. One by one the major pools disappeared--Fortson and Boulder Creek but two of them. The spawning and rearing substrate was greatly reduced.

Gradually the silt washed away. But many small stones and peagravel flats remained. The river is a long ways from returning to its former healthy pool/riffle configuration, but the water the angler reads shows growing promise. Just as the ugliness of a wasted river is heartbreaking, a recovering river reveals reaches of beauty and grandeur. The North Fork now has these. Caddis come to life on clean stones, and there are reaches where fish can spawn and not have their eggs overcome with silt and become smothered. Young fish hatch out and find food and grow, though not as robustly as the did in the past.

The North Fork above and below Deer Creek has shown improvement over the past few years. Much of the river is readable again. True, the Deer Creek Riffle remains a big sandy hole, with no depth to it. Last April--daring myself to do so--I crossed it in off-color water with a wading staff, depending on my eyes (my reading of the water, that is) to find the channel and the pathway across. The tailout was comprised of large stones--a big surprise. The crossing was a bit tricky but I made it easily.

A decade or more ago, the river was not crossable here, even in August. The bottom was huge boulders, the distance between them considerable, and the water was deep and fast. In 1965 Jerry Wintle--a formidable wader--crossed the riffle late in the summer on a bet. He used a green stick and made his way from boulder to boulder, standing on the tops, moving very gingerly. He made it across and won a $5 bet.

I mention this to illustrate the great change that has occurred. The river is improving by degrees. It like a football team that lost all of its games last year, say, sixteen of them, and winning maybe one or two this year. Fish do not like to lie in the Deer Creek Riffle, winter or summer. They used to seek it out and stay there. The riffle has no shade, no depth, no current, no bouldery bottom except now at the tailout. Farther downstream the Elbow Hole is a ghost of itself, sandy and shallow, posing no wading difficulties and with lies to accommodate only a few fish. Yearly I look for signs of it improving, but I can find very few. It may be one of the last pools to recover. Upstream there is more hope.

Once there once was a nice pool near my camp above Deer Creek that deepened its channel and revealed some boulders on my side. I assumed similar rocks ran down the center of the river, so I fished it intently in the high water of spring. It was only after the river dropped and cleared that I saw the pool was full of sand everywhere else. The river fooled me by showing me its shallows and I misread what I saw there.

The same pool provided a valuable lesson in stream dynamics. It was destroyed by a major flood in the early 1980s. The crest took out 900 feet of railroad track, which had to be rebuilt with a huge crane and quarry rock brought in by truckload after truckload. The riprap was extended as protection from another flood of such magnitude and was heavily reinforced. Now the river takes a 90-degree turn and heads downstream at an acute angle. It strikes the base of a soft cliff a couple of hundred yards away, badly undermining it. (This might be called the billiard effect.) The owner--a neighbor of mine named Reynolds--lost about three acres of land, all of it steep riverfront with a grand view. The bank is continuing to crumble and reveals a face of blue clay, alternating with bands of pressed sand; it keeps slumping and will discolor the river for decades. Each time it sprinkles, the river turns gray and holds its cast for a few days or longer.

Elsewhere I see signs of improvement. Rocks are emerging from flats of coarse gravel. The number of juveniles being reared is on the increase. These include two year-classes of steelhead--this year's fry, which will grow to three inches or more before winter shuts down their feeding, and parr that will migrate as smolts the following spring.

This portend a future better than what we have recently experienced, but nowhere approaching the rich past that lies only ten years back.

Like many good things seen in the classic sense, a pool has a beginning, middle, and end. So does a riffle; if a riffle has any depth to it, as a river drops it becomes something like a small pool and can be fished accordingly. It will have guts and pockets and slots and seams. When the water is low it is the riffles that produce, for the pools are like lakes and the worst of them will be growing eutrophic.

The top of a pool is where the angler begins fishing. It is tempting to wade into a pool where the current slackens and the bottom becomes apparent and you can see the lie of boulders where the pool deepens. This makes for easier wading. It is the old mistake and I make it often.

Enter higher, where the wading is difficult. It will put you over more fish--more taking fish, which is what you are after. Two men who enter a river without exception higher than I do, and are better off for it, are Ed Weinstein and Trey Combs. Both know the fly moves faster through water that is not deep and still has a cobbled bottom. It is where they regularly hook fish and, chances are, other anglers out for the day have passed it by because the very top offers difficulty in wading-- and in casting because of the many hanging branches usually found there.

The top of a pool is a pretty thing, riffley and bright and fast. It is narrow and spreads out and deepens as the pool forms. By degrees the pool slows. Previously the river could be read only from the surface and what the angler surmises lies below. Now the pool begins to reveal itself and its bottom by bits. Bottom is paramount. It is how you judge the pool's ability to attract and hold steelhead and salmon. What you see near your feet is what you presume lies out further, too, where the river deepens and you lose visibility. You presume, that is, unless there are clues that it might be different, and then you adjust your technique accordingly.

The tops or throats of pool vary considerably. Some are narrow and fast, with a chute of white water pouring like a funnel into the main part of the pool, where the chute starts to slow. Other pools simply spill over the tail of the pool above and are marked by some degree of shallowness but no outstanding chute or plume of white. There will be a narrowing, though, and the water will look different, for it will have speeded up markedly and be developing a funneling characteristic.

Some such throats can best be fished while standing in the tailout of the pool above and casting into the very top of the one below. The Kalama is one such river, for the pools are carved out of bedrock and some of them are small and appear in quick succession. To come into them too low is to miss fishing over most of the fish, especially during times of low water. And often in water like this the fish will be occupying shallower lies, for the water is swift and broken, with a boulder bottom. They will rise the short distance necessary to grab the fly as it is rapidly swept along in front of them.

There is a strong correlation between the swiftness of the water and the likelihood of getting a strike from a resting fish. Fish in shallow water are easily spooked, most of the time. But since the surface is broken, this helps negate what might be called "the spooking factor" and cancel it out. Since such riffles are usually shaded with overhanging limbs and have boulders of varying sizes on the bottom, several other criteria of good holding water are met. Fish love to lie here, especially early in the morning--summer or winter. Such places should not be idly passed by without a cast or two. The action can be sudden and dramatic.

A pool begins to widen and to slow. It also gets deeper. To me--as I step-fish through the upper part--this is an exciting time. I expect a strike at every throw, every swing. My enthusiasm is maintained, yard by yard. I am slow to discourage.

The throw must be progressive farther out, for the river grows wider. I find myself beginning to pump out line and reach for my maximum distance. The longer the throw, the greater the drift and the swing. Theoretically at least the chances of hooking a fish increase. But more effort is expended. Often I discover myself making throws right up to my limit. This is tiring. If wind is present (and it usually is), it is even more exhausting. This hastens the time when you will be ready to go home.

The long middle of a pool looms. Because of its length, I always feel optimistic--much as I do at the start of eating an ice-cream cone. So much that is good still lies ahead. And there are often interesting features in a pool--an overhanging limb that poses some casting challenges; a rock that rises out of the current and may have fish in front of it, alongside, or below it; a sunken rock that may grab the line or the fly but may also mark the location of a big fish or of several of them. Here--because of the smooth, even rate of flow--the fly fishes best and its swing is uniform and most effective. If the fly touches bottom directly downstream at the end of its drift, this is means the water is probably being covered thoroughly and the fly is moving at the right speed, which is just short of hanging up. Because the act of fishing is so pleasurable in its easy rituals and routines, and has an automatic aspect to it, there is usually plenty of time to look around and observe what is happening. Often it is nothing on a grand scale. The minutiae is another matter. More is happening in the world of nature on a microscale. One observation leads to a speculation about its source or cause and its relationship to the whole, that is, the ecosystem.

A peeled branch from a black cottonwood, for instance, with an end that looks like it was chopped off with a hatchet while circling the tree, or run through a giant pencil sharpener, marks the work of a beaver. Often a beaver can be found in an urban environment. There are several at work on the edge of the city where I used to live, Seattle. The discovery comes as a surprise. They shun open water during the daylight hours, but occasionally surprise you. Under a cloudy sky, I've seen them a few yards out from shore on Lake Washington, moving from here to there. The evidence of their nightly activity is awesome in the volume of downed timber they leave in their path. They are non-selective. Where we have the fewest trees they seem to be most active. Soon the park department will have to entice them into traps set to save the trees. Sorry, but there are not enough cottonwoods for us to share.

On a river there are often otters, plus mink and weasels. When winter comes, the weasel becomes an ermine, and accomplishes this feat by degrees, becoming most interestingly colored in the meanwhile. My goal is to see one any color than the rich summer brown. When snow comes, my chances decrease to zero, unless my less-than-keen eye detects some movement in the peripheral range. I know there is not much chance.

To see a mink, you have to think mink and believe that one might be there. You have to key to mink-like scurrying movements along the rocks and stones opposite you. Then you may be surprised by what you see. You will see . . . birds. You will see many small brown nondescript birds. You can call them in your mind sparrows or wrens, but they probably are not. What are they, then? Ah, you have to remember what you see and carry home your memories in detail to a bird book. Then you will be met with a wealth of similar and disturbing detail.

It is also a book about thinking about what is going on around you while you fish with a wet fly, and this includes all in the non-world of salmonids. Nature is dominant, wonderful. It surrounds you. It includes the woods, the water, the weather, the creatures. You and your possible big fish for today are minor characters in the drama.

The vast middle of one pool is remarkably similar to another, its attractions subtle and low-keyed. The pool fishes best in its center, for here it has a uniform rate of flow and a depth that does not vary much. A long throw is required and the fly moves at a consistent speed as the line adjustments necessary for it to fish well become fewer. A Spey rod is excellent for this. It is the place where the take of a large fish may surprise you--though you expect one, all along, and have almost given up hopes of it happening and are beginning to relax in your boots.

The long middle of a pool is also a good place to hook and play a big fish, for there is plenty of room below you until the bottom of the pool is reached and usually there is an expanse of cobbled beach behind you on which to land your fish. (We disdain the use of nets and gaffs and tailers, and prefer to slide our fish gently onto the stones or, better yet, strand it in the shallows, where it remains wet and in its native environment while the hook is gently removed and the fish reversed in the water and allowed to swim free.)

Hooking a fish in the middle of such a pool and not moving downstream with it, as it runs repeatedly in that direction, allows the angler some elbow room in playing it. There is a temptation to follow the fish down to the tail of the pool, especially if it is a big male that keeps returning there, but I advise against it. Keep high in the pool and make the fish come back to you, if you possibly can. Most will, but there are a few that won't, and good luck there. Fish don't like to leave tailouts and tend to remain there, rather than swimming downstream through them and into the fast water below; in fact, when a fish leaves the tailout of a long pool, it is generally for one of two reasons: either it is being held too hard, all the while, and continues pulling against the restraint, or else, it is very tired and unable to swim or hold its position in the current, and the current carries the fish over, probably unwillingly.

The seemingly uniform long middle of a pool will reveal much variety to the angler who can read its surface swirls, its multiple seams, the topography of its cutbank (which indicates what might be under the surface), its depth or lack thereof, and its rate of flow. All this can be observed without being able to see more than a few inches beneath the surface. If you can see deeper, you will discover more. But it is not really necessary, in most cases.

The angler soon develops a feel for what is good holding water, after giving it a cursory read. This the kind of water that big fish love to lie in, and it does not change its characteristics from river to river, or fish to fish. If you hook a fish in a certain kind of water (sorry not to be able to be more explicit here, but there are many kinds of holding water and steelhead and salmon react to them all similarly), you should return to the same spot, or spots like it, and you will often find a fresh steelhead has quickly replaced the one you caught earlier. This can go on day after day, year after year, in season and out.

Such a place is often called a locker. Lockers get named after people who are most successful there. (In the Manure Spreader Hole, before its great change from the DeForest Creek slide, there was a slot near the far bank, up high in the pool, called Rad's Locker, after Rad Russell, a doctor, a long-time dead. Such lockers lose their names or acquire new ones, their short fame swallowed up by new scores, the old names remembered only by a few.) It is considered an honor to have a locker named after you, and many anglers vainly name them after themselves (as they have their flies), only to have them ignored by others. But every angler who fishes very much will have acquired many personal lockers that he returns to repeatedly, hopefully, and if it is a true locker it will remain faithful to him and give him many a fish. My Camp Pool on the Wenatchee was one of these.

Lockers are not found only in the long middle of pools but anywhere in them. However, because of the stream channel's geologic morphology, most of them lie out in the middle. They differ from other portions of the channel in ways that are not always obvious The experience angler will try to locate them by non-changing characteristics so he can return to them precisely on a future trip. To do this he must line up his locker with objects on the bank and take bearings from there. Since one object, or even two, will not give him the exact same location, he often picks a third object. This is called triangulation and is a technique borrowed from military map-reading. It is an essential part of stream-reading, as well.

The corner of a porch, a peculiar rock on the cutbank side of the river, a fence post, a culvert , a tree--all are good bearing points. I find I don't have to memorize them, only recall them dimly from past takes. They file themselves indelibly in my mind and can be called up when required. I would argue that I haven't forgotten a single place in a run where I've hooked a fish, not in several decades. But my notebooks indicate otherwise, and some of the entries and the points of triangulation I simply don't remember, or can't recall well enough to be usable. So the unforgettability aspect is not what I would like it to be, and I admit it. Best make notes.

What you do is this: you stand in the water at your usual wading depth and look upstream and down. Then you look behind you. The first bearing spot is the critical one; you adjust your position from it according to the other two, moving your eyes up or down until you are lined up, as you best remember the spot. You make your cast to the memorable distance. If it feels too short, you fish it out, but make the next one longer; if too long, then you shorten up on the one that follows.

Once you are convinced you are where you want to be, both with your body and the placement of your fly, you must try to duplicate the speed and depth of the fly's swing. If you touched a rock at the bottom of the swing, originally, and you do so again, so much the better: you are right on. Try to duplicate the location, the throw, and the way you fished out the drift, using whatever data memory provides. I repeat: this is most often done on a less than conscious level. I am trying to make it obvious only for the purpose of analysis and discussion.

What happens if a fish doesn't take in the remembered location, with a throw and a drift that imitates as best you can the one that hooked a good fish, either recently or long ago?

The tailout of a pool is my favorite place in all the world, but on the North Fork tailouts have largely vanished, one by one, as a result of environmental degradation. The amount of bedload deposits to the river as a whole and to my best pools have made pool and riffle look much the same, and have shallowed the great pools and ruined their tailouts.

A tailout is where the current quickens, the channel remains broad, the morphology tilts upwards and is broken by a number of good-sized boulders, and the river prepares to spill over into the riffle that lies below. It marks the end of the pool.

It is a place where steelhead and salmon running a river are inclined to stop and rest. In the tailout they are usually ready takers. I could bore you with multiple examples, but will not. On a high winter river, with a suitable sinking line and a fly that gets down near the bottom, it is where an accomplished angler expects to hook a fish. Occasionally he does.

Perhaps because the current quickens there, my expectations do, too. Or they are evenly matched. Years ago Fortson had a great tailout. So did the Boulder Creek run. And so did the Flats, my favorite pool. A fish hooked in any of these places practically guaranteed a good fight. Fast, shallow water is where fish perform their best. They can't seek bottom and hold there easily. They can't find soft water at the edge of a seam and move out of the current, where fighting both the river's pull and the rod will tire them fast. The river is similarly fast and shallow everywhere, and the fish must resort to running hard, with numerous leaps at the end of each run to try and rid itself of the fly. These efforts tire it and enable it to be defeated.

Sport most likely occurs in a tailout. It is also--because of the speed of the current, the uneven bottom where the angler balances, and the added depth to which he has waded in order to reach the far bank--where the angler's situation is most precarious. The tailout is where he is more apt to loose his balance and fall in. It is where he may take a serious tumble and be swept into the white-water chute below.

Tailouts are fun and exciting, too. They are challenging to wade, even if you don't have a fish on the end of your line, way out there, porposing.

After hooking a good fish and getting it slightly under control, the angler is faced with the problem of working his way back to the beach and landing his fish. Often this blind, backward wading is difficult and treacherous. It is easy to stumble and fall on your back and be spun around by the current. You must pick your way slowly, carefully, step by step, putting your booted feet in between rocks which have no room for them, all the while a fierce pull is being exerted by the fish from the opposite direction. And you are facing away from where you are going, all the while, at least until the water grows shallow and slow enough that you dare attempt a turn around and face the beach.

Fun, I say? Great fun and adventure? Yes. It is not often that you fall in and, if the fish doesn't come off during the first leap or two, you probably will get it to the beach and land it.

To read a river well, you need to acquire some technical information. A river is a channel holding a fixed volume of water. The volume varies over time with the season, temperature, rainfall, etc. In time of drought, the volume is low; in flood, high. But another factor is important, since a river is not like a lake. Our water is moving. The rate of speed varies with its volume.

The volume of a river is measured in cubic feet, like much else. Refrigerator interiors, for instances, and box cars. Roderick Haig-Brown tells us, "A river never sleeps." Hell, it doesn't take a coffee break. It doesn't hang on its oars, panting, not even for a moment. It is always forging ahead, always performing work, always gaining new ground. Work can be defined by moving a volume (measured in cubic feet) a distance (feet, yard, meters) over time. The unit of time most useful in measuring large volumes of water is the second. The two units expressed together are called velocity.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency takes daily readings of rivers in my state, Washington, and passes them on to fishers and white-water enthusiasts over a toll-free telephone line. (206-526-8530.) It is also available in more comprehensive form over the Internet: http://wwwwatcm.wr.usgs.gov/rt-cgi/gen_stn_pg? One data is the rate of flow in cubic feet per second (cfs). Sometimes in winter, when there are heavy rains and snowmelt, the change from day to day is extraordinary. On the web the data is available in either numeric tables or in a moving chart. The chart provides a dynamic means of measuring what a river does over a set period of time, such as a week or month. But the data will also reveal by the hour a river’s often wide fluctuations, such as when water is release from a dam or when a heavy storm hits.

In the winter I study daily readings from the North Fork of the Stillaguamish and the Skykomish in order to know which river will be in best shape. In early spring, in addition to these rivers, I keep a keen eye on the Sauk and Skagit. In the fall there is the Wenatchee to monitor, along with the Grand Ronde. I jot down key data on the backs of old envelopes, along with the daily gauge-heights, if I am planning a trip, which is apt to be long distance. But then—because I am not very well organized—this data gets mixed up with other slips of paper and I lose them. Well, the NOAA data is easily retrievable from the Web. My old methods are not so critical anymore.

Gauge readings are important because they measure the true vertical measure of a river taken at a fixed location and at about the same time every day. But cfs tell you more, once you get to know and use them. Cfs will tell you the ideal fishing height and the degree to which the river is either rising or dropping, and how slowly or quickly.

The real height of a river measured this way may be misleading to one who is used to judging it by the amount of wet sand glimpsed along a favorite beach, when starting out for a day’s fishing. Fishers often jam a stick in the wet sand to come back to (and are dismayed to return and find it has fallen over, the hole filled in with water.) This is so they can determine how much it has dropped since their last visit, say, yesterday. Well, good luck. If the river has risen much, the stick is covered with water, has loosened, and soon floats away.

The height of a river measured on the gauge always seems less than when measured with a mark on the beach. This can be expressed geometrically by a right-angle triangle. A one or two inch drop of the level may be considerable in a twenty-four hour period of time, but the stick on the beach will have been retreated from the edge of the river by a much greater distance and will lead to misleading conclusions. Hence, it is a poor measure. When some fisher informs you that the river has dropped "a foot," it may have dropped only a couple of inches when measured vertically. You may make a wasted trip to a river that is still raging.

On a river such as the Sauk, with the right NOAA data on the river gauge, I can often calculate within an hour or two of when it will snap back into shape. On the Wenatchee, on the other hand, I go entirely by cfs. The location of the gauge on a river, and whether or not it is above or below a major tributary, can be of utmost importance. For instance, measuring the Skagit above or below the confluence with the Baker, can make a lot of difference in terms of both height and turbidity. In the case of the Wenatchee--and other streams that flow through agricultural country where there is a seasonal diversion--it is important to know whether the river is being measured above or below the irrigation outtake, for the diversion represents about a quarter of the river's total volume..

The Wenatchee varies hugely in its rate of flow. It is a wonderful, wild river, draining a big lake, fed by many thousands of acres of pine forest, which is snow country, and in torrent in spring it is awesome. In floodtime it is taken over by bold kayakers. Its cfs rate then is in excess of 3500 and is unfishable. The kayakers can have it then. By the time I get interested, it is flowing so slowly that they have gone elsewhere. Its cfs will be running from 600 to about twice that number. The river is easily wadable, its chief topographical features clearly visible beneath its clear surface.

I first fished the Wenatchee one year when the snow runoff had peaked and the river dropped quickly to 1350 cfs. It was mid-July, a time when no fish should be expected to be in the river yet. I determined that one or two of my favorite pools might be barely fishable. I hopped in my car off. The Camp Pool was barely wadable and under two feet of heavy water. Just getting out to the casting bar was more excitement than I wanted. I hooked a fish quite soon and had great difficulty landing it. Finally I brought it into a tiny slough that in normal water would be but a dip in a high gravel beach. The fish was bright and wild. I released it in the company of three nosy Labrador retrievers. (This is called the hat trick.) It weighed about nine pounds.

The next morning I fished again and caught nothing. The river was now at a perfect height, according to its cfs. I caught nothing. But it was great fun to be fishing a familiar river running at ideal height. I did not return for a month and a half. Meanwhile the river continued its steady fall. I knew this because I regularly monitored its cfs. I was busy and could not get back until its cfs read 420. This was very low. During September they dropped to 360, 350, 340. Nobody had heard of such low readings. In October they descended to 320 and vast sandstone ledges rose out of the water like snow moguls. Every pool was dead and the broad riffles had turned into backwater eddies.

Determined I stuck it out. The fishing did not improve. The irrigation diversion ended late in October and the river obediently rose a couple hundred cfs. It remained close to dead-low but this was a marked improvement. The riffles sped along, the pools showing a channel, a seam. It rained, and the river rose a few more inches. I didn't collect the cfs readings, but my eye said they were about 700 and headed up. The river predictably rose to 900 before it started to drop slowly again. I took a few fish, but it was a dismal season and I soon broke camp and headed for home. The river looked to be back up to 400 or 450. My eye told me this as drove along the canyon road.

One must fish one's water as best one can, and take potluck with what the river offers. But learning to read the data will save an angler a lot of wasted time, and make the time that he has to spend on fishing much more productive.

Data such as NOAA provides over the Internet is available throughout the United States and is a valuable aid to fishers, wherever they live. Such information is highly regional and subject to interpretation. When I write about the streams that I fish, and use their data, it is because I know them best. But what I’ve learned is applicable to other rivers--East, South, Northeast, Southwest--once you’ve learned what to look for and how to interpret it. No matter where you live, if you fish streams, you will soon have your own network of places to go, depending upon the vagaries of weather, largely rainfall and sometimes snow. Perhaps another fisher can extrapolate from what I’ve learned locally. (All fishing is local, by the way.)

In winter the gauge height on my favorite rivers is around 5.5. This is a little high for the Sauk, but about right for the North Fork of the Stilly and the mainstem Sky. The similar number is a coincidence. On the Skagit a gauge reading of 18-20 is good, at least for the fly. And of course, the farther up in a river system you intend to fish, the higher the admissible gauge height and the more cfs the river can stand.

So on the North Fork 5.2 may be too high for the Oso reach, but is getting too low for pools in the Fortson area to fish well. Similarly on the Sky at Monroe, which is low down in the system, or at Reiter Ponds, where the rearing ponds are located, high up on its main stem.

Height is not all, not by any means. Turbidity is important, too, perhaps more so. Turbidity is simply how dirty a river is. It is measured by how far down a person can see bottom. On still waters, such as a lake, a white plate about a meter in diameter is lowered on a cable until it disappears. The plate is called a Secchi disc or dish. The depth at which it vanishes indicates the visibility or water clarity. It is usually measured in meters and centimeters, but feet and inches will do practically, if that seems easier. It does to me. But fishers measure the depth according to where their wader bootfeet disappear. It is a rough measurement but a good one. From it they can tell whether a river is marginally fishable or not. (Of course there is a "gray" area, in which a really determined fisher will persist, while a less determined one will reel in and go home.)

For most river fishers eleven inches is considered to be the worst possible acceptable amount of turbidity. Eighteen inches is okay for some bait fishers. Two feet about the least a fly fisher will accept. Three feet is ideal. And more is probably "too clear." If a river is too clear in any but summer dry-fly time, even sunk-fly fishers get discouraged, for fish are thought to "hole up" and go off the take. It is even worse when the temperature drops below freezing at such a time. All of which is nonsense, of course, and is daily violated by fishers who are out for a day's fun and think they know better. But at the same time these are known rules-of- thumb and attention should be paid to them.

More important than absolute matters of turbidity is the kind of particulate matter that in suspension colors the water and reveals the particulate's source. Here we leave applied science and enter the vast unknown. Fishers divide dirty water into several broad types or classifications. Silt and sand and logging debris in the turbidity are bad news and portend a wasted river, one with bad fishing. Water flowing from a bog with downed timber in it and fallen leaves has a tea-colored look and is called steeped. It has false clarity, for while you can see some distance through it fishing usually is poor until the color runs out and the green returns.

Steeped water, like water carrying some soil types, can clear quickly. This is not so bad. Water with a brown cast turns green by degrees, and green is what we seek, we fishers. I've found dirty water on the Sauk in April that was quickly turning, and I knew from experience it was only a matter of an hour or two before it would be acceptably green. I planned my activities accordingly and caught fish.

You can learn to recognize "turning water" by experience and determine how soon it will be fishable. This varies from river to river. It is one sound argument in getting to know one or two rivers well. You will be wrong many times at the start, but you will learn from your mistakes and make fewer of them in the future. You will return to your favorite river at the time that is just right.

Clay-colored water is not the abomination many people think it is. The North Fork used to be gray all summer and we caught plenty of fish. Clay is particles of aluminum oxide held in suspension and the distance between them is considerable and that space consists of clear water. The light bouncing off of the particles makes the water look dirtier than it really is; as daylight lowers, a decided green cast returns to the water and you will be surprised at how deep you can see into it. Fish see well, too.

The degree of clarity is measured by its light-scattering properties or coefficient of the particles. This is measured several ways; in lakes it is read with the Secchi disc. There is no similar device for a river. The important thing for us to know is not to turn away from a river that has only a small amount of clay clouding it. It may be highly fishable. Bright colors are called for in flies or, oddly, purple or black. Both these dark colors show up exceedingly well. And the fish seem to like them.

I've noticed an odd correlation between the length of time it takes a river to rise and the time necessary for it to fall and clear. If it rises quickly, it drops about as fast, but when a river rises steadily and stays high for days or even weeks, it will take a similarly long time for it to drop and clear. I've never heard this commented on before. It holds true for winter or summer and I guess the seasons between. When a river comes up suddenly as a result of hard, steady rain, snowmelt from the sun, or the infamous "rain-on-snow event," it turns an opaque color and it is probably useless to continue fishing or to fish again until it has settled back into its banks and cleared a lot. This will take days, perhaps a week. It is to some degree temperature dependent. The colder the air gets, the quicker the river drops and clears. The opposite is also true. The warmer the air, and the more rain that falls, the longer it will take for a river to resume its normal flow.

It is paradoxical. Rain is what brings the river up and makes it unfishable. But rain is what calls the steelhead and salmon in from the sea, especially in winter. In fall and in spring, as well, a river is out of condition much of the time, but when it drops and clears the fishing is often superb. A freeze will hurry along the clearing process, but brings other problems in its wake. Too cold is as bad as not cold enough. And since a river is constantly changing its rate of flow, etc., the ideal time for fishing is short and must be seized upon, or lost.

One cold day in mid-December, with the Green River near Auburn unseasonably low, I went out armed only with fly. There were steelhead in the river, but it had dropped so quickly and so far that the gear fishermen could barely get a drift through their favorite runs. And because the water was so low so early, few fishers were out. I hooked my first fish just below the mouth of Soos Creek as a train roared across the bridge. By friend, Billy, who worked for Northern Pacific there, couldn't hear me shout over the noise from his train and missed the whole spectacle of the fish jumping before the hook straightened out. Afterwards, my waving made absolutely no sense to him, for he could see nothing was going on.

I crossed and began at the top of the Car Bodies Hole. I soon hooked another fine fish, which jumped and showed me how winter-bright he was. But he soon swam round a snag--there are many of them in the Green--and I had to break him off. At the bottom of the run, perhaps a hundred yards downstream, I hooked a third fish. I saw this one, too. It was small, probably only five pounds, so I decided to horse it to the beach. It came in splashing--and flipped off in the shallows, swimming free.

I was ecstatic. Three fish in less than two hours, all hooked in a cold winter river, with snow along the edges? It mattered little if I lost them all. I returned, but could not repeat the feat, or come close. Soon the weather warmed and the rains returned. The Green rose and went out. When it came back in, it belonged to the bait fishers.

Winters in the Pacific Northwest are notorious for rivers being out of shape all weekend and coming into fishing condition briefly at mid-week. Often this is for only a few hours, say, on a Wednesday afternoon. It is pretty hard to make a season out of such short outtakes. But we try.

Armed with data on cfs and from river gauges as reported by NOAA, a fisher decides the time is ripe for a trip to a selected river. It is either rising or falling, and it will have a variable amount of clarity which he measures by the depth at which he can see his bootfeet when waded out in the shallows. From this he determines whether it is worth his precious time to keep fishing, or head for home.

If he decides to stay, what he observes in the field and from the data gathered before his trip will determine his fly selection and the kind of sinking line to use in order to get his fly close to the bottom but not repeatedly hanging up on it and having to break off his fly and tippet. Flies--even if he ties his own--are annoying to lose. And hooks cost money, good hooks a lot of money.

Are there any other important things to know that will effect his chances of getting a fish, today?

Oh, yes. There are seasonal considerations. Another way of saying this is he is more apt to run into fish at some times of the year than at others. These fluctuate according to river and region. And there are annual variations among the seasonal, as well.

Some rivers get a heavy run of winter fish by December first. Most do not. To fish one river then may be a waste of time from a fish-production standpoint, while another river may be ideal. To learn these things is why some anglers join fishing clubs, hang around sporting goods stores, and stand along the riverbank asking questions and guardedly recording the answers in their minds. They are trying to telescope the learning process in a field where the truth is not always evident and sometimes is intentionally obscured.

One year on Thanksgiving--again on the Green River near Auburn--I went out for an afternoon's fishing before The Big Meal. The river was high, but wadable. There was little competition because of the holiday, I guess. I hooked a big fish and had a terrible time with it. I was waded far out in a swollen river, fishing the bank pockets, and the fish took with a surge, then headed South. It hung for a moment in the swift tailout, then plunged over into the top of the Car Bodies Hole.

For a few minutes I thought I could follow the fish; I believed I could cross the river and work my way through a narrow gut on the far side, but as I neared it I became fearful. The river was a few inches higher and stronger than I had ever crossed here before. I got to the edge of the gut and lost my nerve. Meanwhile, the fish came to a rest in the center of the lower pool, right where the water slowed--a point about 200 feet below me.

I decided to backtrack my course through the shallow fast water, but now my route was slightly upstream and the current was powerful. I sloshed along, throwing my hips from side to side in order to move my heavy feet and swinging my shoulders, too, one of which had a fish attached to the arm below. Halfway back to the barside I became exhausted. I stood panting, trying to get my strength back, feeling as though I had an onslaught of the flu. The last hundred feet was a nightmare. Twice I fell in the shallows; twice I picked myself off my knees and continued, always battling the bent rod and straining line.

Coming out of the water at last, I reached for a piece of riprap to sustain me, slipped, and cut my hand where my thumb joins my first finger. (Today the half-moon scar reminds me of that day and the fish.) Anyway, I clambered up on the rocks and followed the fish down the top of the riprap, which was flat and paved. I had to keep clearing my strung line from the leafless willows that lined the bank, but I managed to and continued chasing my fish. Halfway down I came across a gear fisherman with a salmon-sized dipnet. We crammed the tired fish into the net and lugged it up on the plateau behind us, where I killed it.

It weighed fourteen pounds. So tired and sick, I lugged it back to the car and drove home with an aching fever. I could eat no turkey. Perhaps it was the flu, but maybe it was simply that the big fish in heavy water unstarched me, I don't know. Later, I read in the newspaper that the Green had been blessed with an early run of big native steelhead. A number had been caught. The fish went between 12 and 16 pounds, or slightly more. My fish was about average.

So, might an angler expect to encounter big, early-run, wild winter steelhead in the Green?

Usually what you run into in the Green is a lot of silver salmon, which are also called coho. For every steelhead you catch, up until mid- December, you will hook and release about six coho--dark fish that are ready to spawn. And if this is what you don't want, and believe as I do that salmon near spawning time should not be molested with lure or fly, you will be greatly disappointed with what the river has to offer.

Similarly, in the Snoqualmie and my river, the North Fork, what you encounter in December is apt to be the vestiges of the dog-salmon run--ripe fish with violet bars and white fungus, fish whose scales have turned to slime and whose bodies are soft and mushy. You ought not want these, either. It is an in between season, one when the hope if for bright steelhead but the likelihood is dark salmon and summer-run steelhead

One day in early December I caught a bright fish that I judged to be a fresh steelhead of about five or six pounds. Standing in fast water, I grabbed the leader and the fish spun around, belly up. To save my fingers, I used needlenose pliers to reverse the hook quickly, not noticing the two orange slashes under the fish's jaw until it was too late. The fish was gone. Then the difference in the spotting pattern became clear. I had released the biggest searun cutthroat of my life. I would have been tempted to keep it, I know, so it was probably all for the best.

Off-season fishing in a river containing runs of various anadromous fishes can be exciting. These are rare events. Most of the time the fishing is drab. Between the major runs of winter or summer steelhead, your chances of getting a fresh fish decrease substantially. Often such fishing isn't worth the serious angler's time.

Still, there is the odd chance of something unusual happening. One Halloween, years ago, I found myself fishing with my old companions Ed Weinstein, Bob Taylor, and Jerry Wintle. It was unusual for us to be fishing together, all at once. The river was high and the most we could hope for was some rusty old summer run. And this is what Frank Snyder had caught and kept in the Manure Spreader Hole; we saw the Deer Creek native lying on the wet sand, as we passed by.

Jerry caught a nice searun cutthroat, I remember. But it was my day. I caught a big cutthroat, too, plus a mint-bright nine-pound steelhead from the Flats. It took in the tailout and jumped and jumped. I suppose I killed it, too. I was used to providing my family with a fish, every now and then. I don't know if it was a summer run or a winter, or whether it mattered to me. This was back before hatchery steelhead were clipped. The fish remains an enigma, a highly memorable one.

Another year, in March, large bright steelhead were reported taken in the main stem of the Stillaguamish. These were fish with "no eggs in them"--an indication they were either spawned-out winter fish (unlikely because of their brightness and general condition) or early summer runs. If the latter, their eggs and milts were so tiny they could be easily overlooked when the anglers cleaned them.

The season closed and I thought no more about them, not having caught any myself. I forgot all about them. When the summer season opened my friends and I started catching big, bright hatchery steelhead in the Fortson area. Sixteen pounders were common; I remember seeing several before I caught one myself. Ed Nivens caught six that were verified--one remembers thing like this. I saw another sixteen pounder horsed up on the beach. My own big fish came from the Boulder Creek area in June, nearly a month later.

These were the same fish reported in March in the lower river. I finally puzzled it out.

Seasonal timing is important. Before the days of hatchery winter steelhead, the first sizable runs could not be expected until the first of the new year. New Year's Day, in fact, commonly marked the start of the season.

Things changed. In the Sixties, if you started this late, you might miss a third of the run. These were predominantly hatchery fish. There were so many of them in most rivers that anglers such as myself cut our eyeteeth on them. They averaged six to eight pounds; often the females went six, the males about seven and a quarter. Those in the Puget Sound area came from the Chambers Creek Hatchery near Tacoma. Similar hatcheries were placed around the state and in Oregon.

I caught so many of these small fish on gear that I soon put a set in my cheap fiberglass rod. Since I was fishing from the left bank, the rod developed a turn in that direction, never to straighten out again.

The runs of hatchery fish were dependent on high-water conditions. A flood or near flood would fill the river with fish, but a drought or cold snap kept the fish out in the bay, not ascending until the hard rains returned.

When the Indians were acknowledged as having the right to net steelhead in their usual and accustomed places, they targeted the hatchery steelhead. They did this for practical reasons. A netset in December or early January was productive; the rest of the year it was not--at least not for steelhead. And since an Indian fisher is no more ambitious than a white one, he wants to maximize his fishing time. He wants to fish with the least amount of effort and take his catch to market and pocket the change. I don't blame him any; I would, too. It is why he goes after the hatchery fish, not the wild ones. It is a good tradeoff.

This has changed the expectations of when a flyfisher may encounter a fresh winter steelhead. The Indian commercial fishery has captured the bulk of the run, according to treaty rights. This is legal. But it adversely effects sportsfishers, who now must wait until the nets are pulled before they go out seriously after winter steelhead. We do this because, so many times in the past, we have been greeted by a river in perfect shape but with no fish in it.

Nets are usually pulled at the end of January or up to mid-way through February. Anglers scan their newspapers for reports of the good news. They venture out in droves then. Most often they find the rivers bereft of keepable fish. They must wait for the runs of wild fish at the end of February.

So the traditional winter steelhead season has been truncated by the tribal net fishery. And since the Indian chum- salmon fishery overlaps the start of the winter steelhead season, the nets are pretty much continuously in the rivers and estuaries throughout late fall. What I'm saying is that to venture out in early December through January--traditionally our peak winter time--we are apt to be met with disappointment by an empty river. The fish will have been taken by the nets to the extent that there are not enough of them running the river even under ideal high-water conditions to be worth pursuing.

In February we may encounter hatchery fish that have escaped the nets (they have to be pulled out of the river, some time) and spawned. These are skinny, wasted fish that are next to inedible and are easily caught but of no value to the resource. But about the twentieth of the month we experience the arrival of the wild late-winter steelhead. These are superb fish that take the fly well and fight extraordinarily. Since they are wild, and in most rivers there are not enough of them to exceed escapement goals of the fish biologists, they have to be released. I don't mind doing this, nor do many of my friends, but the chance of a steelhead dinner is slim, in nearly every river in the West.

Wild late-winter fish may be found until late in April, when only spawners are around. Some years on the Sauk I catch such a high percentage of ripe fish that I am ready to ask the Wildlife Department to close down the fishery. But just about the time I reach for the phone, a run of brilliantly colored fish arrive in the river and I change my mind. The fact that these fish are disarmingly near to spawning, too, is forgotten. We keep fishing for them and have good sport.

The bright April steelhead we prize so highly and is the object of so much photography is about to spawn, and the egg or milt masses it contains would be a dead give-away, if we ever killed and cleaned such a fish. (In sharp contrast, the dark steelhead from the Babine that looks like it is spawning in early fall is still months away, and the sexual development is about what one might expect from a September or October fish in any other river systems; the fish is about half-ripe.

This is a reminder that steelhead and salmon have no reason to enter the river except to spawn. This is so self-evident that it hardly needs stating, except I and others tend to forget it and treat steelhead as though they arrive for personal reasons, and will hang around and remain bright indefinitely. This idea is based on our experience with summer runs and our capacity for self-delusion.

About the time the late winter fish are starting to spawn, the smolts of both winter and summer runs are departing the river for the sea, where they will migrate surprisingly long distances and feed voraciously. They will travel far to find the schools of forage fish that are moving, too. In April and May wild summers and winters are spawning in reaches usually far removed from each other. Fry will not hatch out for a couple of months, but last year's fry begin serious river feeding as soon as the river warms and insect life resumes. And then fresh summer runs enter the river and will provide excellent flyfishing over the next several months.

Temperature and rainfall express the eternal verities. Rain brings up the water level--the old cubic feet per second of velocity. Cooler water in fall and winter is what moves fresh fish into our rivers. It is exactly the opposite situation from spring, when warming water temperatures is critical in moving the juveniles as smolts down to the sea.

So temperature matters--both that of the air and the water. Temperature controls the amount of available dissolved oxygen in the water, which is necessary for fish to survive. This is called the biological oxygen demand, or BOD. In warm water plants thrive in sunlight and consume more and more oxygen. If they take too much of it, there is not enough left for insect and fish life, and a body of water is said to be eutrophic. The plant life runs short of oxygen and dies. The water produces a terrible stench. It smells like sewer gas.

High temperatures alone kill fish, too. If it doesn't kill them outright, it stresses them and they die for related reasons. It is best if temperatures never rise much over sixty degrees F. Of course they do, and fish survive. Steelhead juveniles and adults can tolerate temperatures in the 70s, but not for long. They get so high as a result of solar loading, but even in summer the sun is not overhead the full day and when it dips the temperatures do, too. And night brings a respite.

Ken and George McLeod believed that the boulders in Deer Creek caught the sun and stored it, radiating it into the water all night long, and that was why the creek historically ran so warm. I attributed it to the fact that the stream ran East and West, which permitted the sun to track it most of the day, and there was little shade provided by its wide floodplain (caused by snow runoff). But I think the McLeods may have been more right than I. Ken told me he took the temperature on an August morning at the mouth and it was many degrees warmer than the North Fork, which was back in the high 60s.

What do juveniles--who are supposedly more heat sensitive than adults--do, when it grows so warm? They retreat to wherever they can find shade or cooler temperatures, such as springs and tributary creeks. But even so, there is much mortality. Heat and predation are the two main reasons why only a tenth of the fry that hatch ever reach smolting size. And heat, along with a shrinking river, contribute directly to predation, for a river drawing in on itself concentrates its fish populations into the portions with the most dissolved oxygen and coolest temperatures. With so many small fish in so confined an area, the effectiveness of all predators increases. This include man.

Under drought and warm weather conditions I once caught a big Dolly Varden. It was about the right size for dinner for two and kept me from killing a hatchery steelhead, I reasoned. When I opened up the fish with a knife, I found two steelhead parr inside. Both were around seven inches in length. One was digested down to the head, tail, and a skeleton that was visible, with flesh that had turned to mush. The other was only hours old and looked like it could swim away.

The Dolly--on a feeding frenzy based on the opportunity to predate concentrations of small fish--fell victim to a big, bright steelhead fly. (Tough luck, fella, but you deserved it.) The survivors of drought and warm water are the hardiest, which biologically makes them the most deserving. One does not often see the scores of dead fish that didn't make it, or made a meal for fish that had survived, like my Dolly. But the following spring there will be fewer fish to smolt and go to sea, and one or two years hence there will be fewer adults to return. Thus the products of drought and warm water extend far into the future and directly effect the returns and the fishing for several years to come. They may impact it permanently, if the years of drought persist and there is no relief.

Global warming, the effects of El Niño, low rainfall, and high average mean summer temperatures--all of which the Pacific Northwest has experienced of late, year after year, without pause--can reduce the size of a race of fish and lead to its demise.

Add to these negative factors one more important one, the agricultural diversion so necessary to producing apples and pears East of the Cascades in an industry that gives livelihood to thousands of people and nourishment to millions of others. It cannot help but hurt the runs of salmon and steelhead. It is a sad tradeoff that tips the scales in the direction of the "tragedy of the commons."

If warm water kills fish, and you remove a quarter of the flow from a river like the Wenatchee, what happens to its fish populations? How are they to endure? These are not entirely rhetorical questions. Certainly salmonids become stressed, and natural mortality increases. But it may be worse than that. They may die outright from low flows; they may die unobserved and vanish from the living biomass of the river. Or they may adapt over a long period of time, like the Deer Creek fish are thought to have done. Their b