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.