Clevercanaries

I started my new year by getting up at 4:30 in the morning and driving up to Leggett. My sources told me the river was in great shape and getting better every hour. I made it to Rob’s at 8, almost exactly 3 hours after leaving the house.

I really didn’t need to rush up there so quickly. We had to wait until the guy that owns the property at the take out to launch his boat. It seems he has a problem with boats that use that take out fishing ahead of him. In my opinion it doesn’t make much difference which boat fishes first, but I don’t own the property, so I can’t make the rules.

Anyway, we finally launched at about 12:30. The other boat was fishing the first hole when we got there but they soon continued downstream. We didn’t even make it out of the first hole before we had our first fish in the boat.

We ended up catching one more down near the river gauge, but there’s no picture because the photographer caught the fish.

The boat that insisted on launching first caught one fish the whole drift. They were using bait and we were pulling plugs so they fished a little slower then us. We caught up with them right below the gauging station and had to hold back so we didn’t pass them. The only problem with that is we had to hurry, because daylight was getting scarce.

It was a good day, but the next day was promising to be epic, as long as it didn’t rain. But rain it did, hard and all night. By the morning the river had gone up from 598 cfs, to 1,100 cfs by 8 AM. It continued climbing until peaking at 2,010 around 4 in the afternoon.

We made the best of the day and got a lot of stuff done on Rob’s property. It was almost like an episode of Dirtiest Jobs. First we uncovered the septic tank in order to figure out where he could place a modular home. Then I cut up a pine tree that had fallen last year. We hauled the pieces up the hill with the backhoe and a chain. It had been awhile since I had done any work like that and my back was gone by the early afternoon. After taking some ibuprofen and eating some lunch we started a burn pile and got rid of a bunch of crap that had been lying around.

By this morning the weather had cleared up but it was pretty cold. The river was still blown out so I decided to head home. All in all it was a good trip. Nothing like starting the year steelhead fishing.

It’s been kind of a dead week. I’ve seen no arborist jobs advertised at all in the last couple weeks. Being the week between Christmas and New Years doesn’t help either. There have been a few website, computer support and small writing jobs in Craigslist I’ve responded to, but either they don’t get back to me or they reply once then I don’t hear from them again. It’s kind of frustrating.

It’s also been raining up north and that has the river out of shape, so no escape there. I might go up anyway just to chill. Right now I’m open to anything. I would like to fish one more day this year.

This is the graph that I check many times a day during the winter. The level I want to see before I get excited is about 650cfs and dropping.

Christmas has finally come and is almost gone. Now I can concentrate on steelhead fishing. It’s hard to juggle work and winter fishing since the fishing is so dependent of timing. Being there when the river is at the right level and flow makes all the difference.

Right now I’m constantly checking the weather up north and the river levels. I wish I had a webcam set up so I could look at the color. I know what the conditions were when I’ve caught fish in the past, so I know what to look for now. Then I can leave on a moments notice.

One of the things I hated about working at my last job was not getting time off on short notice, so if I had to pick a time of the year to be not working this would be it. I guess that’s one way to be grateful.