I was long overdue for a not-so-run-of-the-mill fishing fix. As they say, I needed to “Feed that Jones”. I have always wanted to fish the Lahontan Cutthroats at Pyramid, but the wife has no interest in flickin flies from a ladder in the often crappy weather there, which means fishing it alone. So I e-mailed my fly fishing buddy in Boise asking him what I would need for a Pyramid trip. He gave me the info I needed, but then slipped in that the Big O (Owyhee River, Oregon) was going off. He had caught a grip of fish the week prior during the last of the Skawala (a stonefly) hatch, including several over 20” and one that went 25”. His biggest fish of the year so far is a 30” brown. His personal best on the Big O is a 34” brown and the best he’s guided a client to is a 36” brown. Hmmmm….wife and I had fished the Big O with him last August and it was awesome.
It was now Monday evening and I was out walking the dogs and geocaching with the wife and I get a call on the cell. It’s Markus. He says screw Pyramid, those Lahontans don’t fight worth a shit and that I need to come up and fish the Big O with him. He was planning to fish the Big O on Wednesday and Thursday, but would be leaving for Salt Lake on Friday. Mentally, I had already punted on Pyramid due to the drive and the Big O was another half day’s drive for just two days of fishing. I’d have to throw stuff together and hop in the truck that night. I tell Markus, nah not this week, maybe next. He says the following week he’s fishing Krembow Lake in Oregon for the big rainbows there. I punt and finish the call by declining the offer. My wife looks at me and says “that was Markus, you need to go. You’ve been letting free trips on Southwest expire, so use one of those. Fly up and do it.” I turn and look at her and damn she’s right. The Big O means beautiful scenery and wade fishing for big brown trout on the dry fly, perfect fishing soul food. So I get home, the flight is booked for the next day and everything is coordinated with Markus. I’m going to Feed that Jones!
When it comes to fishing trout on the rivers, Markus is a dry fly purist.
On our drive over to The Big O, Markus tells me the story of his native American fishing buddy who gets a little crazy when he drinks and will screw just about anything. The story goes they’re on a fishing trip and closing down a bar loaded with women (3) and sure enough his Indian buddy exits with a fat one. When they finally close down the bar and go out to check on him, he’s in the trailer screwing this gal. Now Markus says he doesn’t have a problem with fishing buddies who might have loose moral standards, but he does draw the line at fucking fat chicks. “Like fly fishing, a man must have some standards,” he says. When it comes to fly fishing, Markus draws the line at nymphing. “Nymph fishing is like fucking the fat chick…..I just don’t do it.”
The Owyhee River is about 40 minutes west of Boise, just over the Oregon border. It’s a a tail water fishery coming out of the Owyhee dam with the quality water running approximately 10 miles through a high desert canyon until eventually meeting up with the Snake River. The water is alkaline and has a green stain to it, while the bottom ranges from pebbles to boulders, craggy lava type in some sections, rounded and moss covered in others. The Owyhee hosts trophy sized brown trout and has some rainbows with the mix about 90/10, respectively. The Owyhee is one of the premier brown trout fisheries in the lower 48. Due to it’s relatively small size, the Owyhee is a wade fishery (i.e. no drift or pontoon boats). Even better, the fishing pressure is usually pretty light, as it’s out in the sticks with no improved campgrounds. But the word is getting out about The Big O and now weekends can be crowded, but that’s a relative thing when you’re from SoCal.
Most tail water fisheries have few hatches on them and are primarily nymph fisheries. Not so with The Big O, where the hatches are abundant and occur year round, though the peak hatches occur in the spring and summer.
So the plan was set, we’d be fishing the Big O for browns on the dry fly. My goal was a 20” brown on a size 20 dry fly.
I’ve never been one to shy away from fishing challenges. I seem to be drawn to the to the more challenging forms of fishing as it keeps me motivated and continually learning. No doubt we’ve all had to start somewhere, whether fishing bluegill at the local park lake or triploid trout at the Santa Ana River Lakes. Some never progress beyond such fishing. I assume that economics force them there, or they just don’t know any better. If I had to pick a form of fishing that challenged all of the skills I have built up over 43 years of fishing, fishing the dry fly in a river for big browns would be one of them.
First off, you’re fishing a bug hatch. Though the hatch generally goes off during a certain timeframe (1 to 4 pm on The Big O), micro weather conditions influence the location greatly. So it is that Markus hunts the 10 miles of The Big O from his F350 Super Duty, Super Cab, Long Bed Dually 4x4 with 6.0 Powerstroke Diesel, 6 speed manual transmission, 8” exhaust with punched out catalyst and programmable Edge Chip. With the Edge chip set on level 4, the turbo whine through the exhaust is exactly that of a jet engine spooling up on the runway. The torque from that monster of a truck will take your breath away. The truck rolling along the edge of the road over looking the river while spotting hatches or fish will also take your breath away.
Markus knows The Big O like the back of his hand and on Wednesday we needed it. Weather was post frontal, partly cloudy, erratic winds and periodic showers. We’d find a hatch going off with rising fish and by the time we’d get down to fish it, the wind would come gusting through in the opposite direction and put everything down. No problem, Markus knew another spot that would be protected in these conditions and back into the truck and off we’d go again. This process was repeated many times over and we continued to fish until sundown which also had special spots on The Big O. Considering the conditions, we did ok with a couple fish, biggest about 22” (not the one in the picture).
What you’re looking for during a hatch is birds working and rising fish. Not dissimilar from fishing bites on the saltwater, but you don’t have any electronics to fall back on, only your eyes and instinct. Kinda like the Indian putting his ear to the railroad track. Find a hatch, then you must match it. Fortunately, the hatch was primarily Blue Winged Olives (“BWOs” a type of Mayfly), though there were some Pale Morning Dunns (“PMDs” another type of Mayfly) if the conditions became warm enough. By the end of my intense on the water tutelage, I was beginning to figure out all this entomology stuff.
Periodically while hunting from the road I’d see an angler fishing a tail out where there was no obvious hatch going on and I’d asked Markus what they were doing? He’d say “he’s fucking the fat chick” and we’d simply blow by. I actually saw one of these nymphers hooked up once during the trip.
Once you’ve found a hatch with fish rising, it all comes down to presentation. This is not fishing albacore chummed to the boat where you simply need to hit the ocean with your cast of a kicking piece of live meat, put the reel in gear when you’re picked up and then rope the fish in using some pink or purple high tech reel filled with 80 lb spectra line and a top shot. No, it’s a bit more complicated than that. If there’s the least bit of imperfection in your presentation, the fish ignore it. Remember, you’re competing against a hatch of the real stuff and you’re trying to induce a wary fish to take your fake. Big fish rising and rejecting your best offer no less than 30’ from you has a way of testing you, forcing you to adjust on the spot in order to achieve success.
If your rigging and fly selection is correct, the key is the presentation and that is the drag free drift. Problem is that you’re working against wind, variable current conditions, obstructions on the back cast, etc. It’s one thing to cast a 5 wt floating line 80’, it’s another to get bit on a 20’ to 40’ cast. Generally, the deeper the fish, the further out in front the cast must be placed, as the fish look up and forward while feeding and the deeper they are, the further out in front they look to intercept the feed in the current. You must have the drag free drift on your fly in that zone the fish will be looking in. For me being a relative newcomer to this, I can cast but implementing those small adjustments to get the perfect drift are challenge. There’s the reach cast where you reach out to the side at the end of your cast to throw a mend in your line before it hits the water (used when casting across current). There’s the puddle cast where you pull a haul on your line at the end of the cast to impart a mend on a downstream cast. All of these types of adjustments I would take for granted when throwing my conventional casting gear blind folded, but with the fly fishing it’s still like me throwing in a smile while finishing a triple jump in figure skating: it’s forced, not pretty and the fish know it.
Day two arrives after a night that consisted of a meal of hot dogs and sour kraut, a 12 pack of Kokanee Gold chased by some Chivas Regal. Trailer plopped on a flat overlooking Markus’ Death Row run on the River, it was a good night’s sleep.
View at dusk from camp at Death Row:
Just in case, we inspect the River from the road before deciding to fish a special fast water section. This is a run Markus would take few people to because the water is fast and the wading is difficult. For that reason, it also holds the biggest fish and Markus had already taken a 30” out of there this year. Just the week prior he got a 25” fish there during the Skawala hatch and he suspected the fish would still be there fixated on some big offerings even though the Skawala hatch was over. We start at the top of the run working both sides from the middle. We’re pitching white/beige foam Chernobyls with Markus’ special black and red dot markings from some Sharpies. It’s a big offering compared to a size 20 BWO. I’m dubious that we’d get at take as I’d expect to be using these flies during an August hopper bite. Markus says “it’s a reaction bite and you need fast water so they don’t get a good look at it. Think of it like bass fishing. You want to be drifting right next to the bank, but watch the sweepers (branches hanging in the water). So we work it and I’m not really paying super close attention as I’m not yet a believer. Inevitably the head of a big trout rises to slurp my black & red dot Chernobyl, but I pull the fly from him on the hook set. Damn, missed my chance. Markus follows up and has a huge trout swirl on his black & red dot Chernobyl and misses the hook set. We got a look at that fish and it was an easy 30”. Markus says had he hooked it, most likely he would have done a Brad Pitt (feet first down the run) and lost it. It was one of those proverbial slobs.
It’s noon and the magic time is soon approach, so we leave the fast water to start hunting. Soon we spot some rising fish from the road and hike down to start working them. Dark clouds were moving in and rain would soon be in the mix. Markus is on the other side of the stream working some risers in slower water, while I’m working some in faster water that look to be decent sized. I get a fingerling sized brown, but can’t get the bigger ones to go. Markus is hooked up and yells over that the hatch is going off and he’s got a whole pod of fish in front of him. “Get your ass over here!” I wade over and the surface of the water is awash in BWO’s with no less than 20 rising fish working it. Markus is hooked up again. I’m working it, but the hatch is so thick and the flat light conditions are such that I can’t see my fly. Even if I got a take, I couldn’t see it. Finally, Markus comes over looks at my rig and says “you skipped steps 7, 8 and 9….stop using that bulky saltwater knot, trim the shuck on the fly and use gobs of dessicant (fly drying powder) every third cast just so you can see your white powdered fly from the rest. They’ll still hit it.” I did and he was right, I got bit. Still, I must have pulled the fly from at least 5 fish during that hatch, with nothing to show for it. Reach cast, puddle cast, Turl knot, dessicant, all the while Markus is putting on a dry fly fishing display like no other. It was information overload. I felt like some newby LR fisherman listening to David Choate and fishing next to him at the same time. I’m trying to process it all, but it just ain’t happening. Too much information. Shortly, the showers stopped, sun came out an it was over. We fished a few chosen runs working caddis hatches in the evening with Markus getting a couple more fish and we’re done.
We tow the trailer back to Markus’s place and discuss my options for tomorrow. I tell Markus to drop me off at the rental car places at the airport on their way to Salt Lake. I’ll get a rental car and a motel room and fish The Big O another day. Markus thinks about it and says “how about you take my truck in the morning, fish The Big O, camp in my truck (8’ bed with a shell and a full mattress bed in it), drop it back at my place on Saturday and take a cab to the airport? You’ll save yourself the cost of the rental car and the motel room.” Wow, here’s a guy I’ve fished 6 days with and he’s just handing me the keys to his truck, a monster of a truck no less. Just the thought of peering off the edge of the road looking for fish from his dually had me spooked, but I warmed up to it. Yeah I’ll take you up on the offer.
So off in the morning with some directions to The Big O and phone numbers for airport taxis. I fuel up and grab some grub. The route takes me though a ton of farm land, but I’m missing Markus’ 6th sense hunting narrative: “there’s some quail, check out that cock pheasant, there’s some deer, did you see that tom turkey?” I pass through Adrian, on the Oregon side of the Snake River and north of town I make the left turn towards the Owyhee River Valley.
At the top of the grade before entering the Valley, I remembered that you lose cell phone reception there. I pull over and call my wife. “Hi honey, I’m just about dropping down into the Owyhee River Valley and I’ll lose cell phone reception until Saturday. Just wanted to let you know that I now understand where your coming from when you refuse to let me teach you anything about fly fishing.” She responds, “oh yeah, how so?” “Well remember how you’d told me that you always felt totally reliant on me in our conventional saltwater fishing? You’d ask why I picked that lure? You have 80 some odd marlin lures, so why didn’t you change any when we’re not getting bit? Why didn’t you do this or that? Why did we fish there? Why did we do that?” I had always tried to methodically explain, but now I knew it was just information overload. For that reason, my wife wants to learn the fly fishing on her own (at least not from me) as much as possible. She wants to process the information at her own speed, away from me. Such an arrangement has its drawback or benefits, depending on how you look at it. It means we have double of everything! As I faced the day fishing The Big O alone, I knew that I would have to process and deploy the information overload from Markus on my own. There would be no intimidation factor from fishing alongside a guy who’s forgotten more about this than I’ll ever know. It would be just me armed with a ton of info trying to deploy it and convert that into fish. So I told my wife I understood where’s she’s coming from. "Wish me luck, I’m going for it." The turbo spooled up and off I went.
Along the way I took some photos because this was also a scouting trip, as I planned to be back with the wife later this year. The camping is primitive there, so you need to bring everything. The wife insists on being able to at least wash her face with warm water in morning, so I scoped out Snively Hot Springs, thinking that late at night, bottle of Cabernet and I’m……
Back to fishing in 50 degree tail water. Hit the fast water with the black & red dot Chernobyl for nothing. It’s noon and I head up to the Bridge Run just below the dam to start my hunting.
Owyhee dam office.
I always wanted to be the dam man. That way I could tell my wife I'm off to the dam office in morning.
It’s bright and sunny with winds light and variable and the temp is 65. Not good for a full on BWO hatch, but somehow I knew something would happen there. I took a brief catnap in the driver’s seat and awoke about 1:15 pm to see a few scattered risers. Already some nice fish working. I quickly tied on a size 20 BWO Hackle Stacker and get at it. Start working the closest fish in the run and wham I’m on. Decent fish of about 18”.
Move onto working the next fish. Make a couple drifts for nada. Dry my fly and add some floatant, noticing some of the hatch drifting past as I look down at the water. Definitely BWOs. Next cast and as it passes the fish it turns and goes for it. It was as if it passed up my offering in the normal rise and gulp rhythm, thought twice about it after getting a good look and turned and went for it. It was one of those going away strikes, which are hard to miss on the hookset. It’s a good fish. It takes a nice run upstream before I get him to shore, but he’d have nothing to do with that and goes off on another run. I finally get him up shallow, flop him up on shore and quickly take some pictures. I noted that he swallowed the fly so I simply broke it off and released him. He swam away just fine.
I worked the fish all the way across the run, pulling the fly on one and breaking the fly off in the fish on another strike. Those fish did not come back after feeling the steel. I pulled out and went off to hunt.
I found several places with risers and worked them, but it was after 4 pm and the hatch was very spotty at best. In one spot showing risers there was a young married couple with the husband giving some fly casting instruction to his wife of 5 years. I yelled down and asked if I could work the fish rising about 50 yards above them and he said no problem. After I was done with that spot I stopped and chatted with them telling him about my educational experience with wife and fly fishing. We had a good laugh and I left to do some more hunting. Found this big fish rising and took some shots from the road before I went down to work him. For size reference the bigger rocks are about 4’ across. Much as I tried, could not get that fish to go, same with his smaller cousin just below. In the waning light of day, I unsuccessfully worked several more spots before camping in the flats above Death Row, reportedly an excellent nymphing spot. After eating a Subway sandwich chased by a Gatorade, I passed off to sleep thinking about the day. Not bad I thought, for a relative newby.
Next morning headed out, washed and filled Markus’ truck, left him a note, a banana, a bag of Doritos and a bottle of Chivas on the seat and called a cab for the airport. Talked to the Llamas across the street while waiting for the cab to arrive.
The taxi driver gave me the distressed commercial real estate tour of Boise on the way to the airport. See that framed 4 story building there, that one over there. Yep, it was a sure sign I was back in the real world.
Some shots that will keep me coming back:
P.S. Sorry if I offended any nymphers. The fat chicks need loving too and someone’s got to do it.
P.S.S. Sorry if I offended those who chuck live meat for albacore. We all gotta Feed that Jones some time and it comes in many forms.
P.S.S.S. Sorry if I offended anyone. I’m just trying to have some fun and share it with others who might appreciate it.
P.S.S.S.S Capt. G no to your question on the riser taking a nymph. When they're rising they're looking up to feed, not down. On the Big O, nymph fish are taken at the bottom of tail outs. Fish will stack up there to feed on nymphs washed through the tail out.
.. Great report Steve looks like a wonderful trip, I need one of those fly rods for the Dorados!
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