On the Olympic Peninsula there are salmon in the cedars and in the firs and alder. Salmon bring the richness of the sea to the rivers. Salmon carcasses hauled ashore by bears and birds and otters richen the soil.
Line streaked off the reel as the fish peeled away on its first run.
In September on the Olympic Peninsula a black bear can afford to be picky.
The bear plucks a salmon from a shallow stream. If the fish is an unripe female, it may kill it, drop it and try for another. It might only take one bite. Out of the belly.
Not all bears can fish. Some are good at it. Others eat the scraps.
On a remote stream on the Olympic Peninsula, a fishy bear might pluck a dozen salmon from a stream in one day. The bear will eat some, but it will leave much of a hundred pounds of flesh to rot, to turn to fertilizer by other bears, by the insects, the rodents, eagles, coyotes and foxes. And nitrogen and phosphorous concentrations on the banks grow Olympic Peninsula timber at triple the rate of rivers without salmon.
On the Olympic Peninsula there are salmon in the cedars and in the firs and alder. Salmon bring the richness of the sea to the rivers. Salmon carcasses hauled ashore by bears and birds and otters richen the soil. And if the essence of the ocean is in the timber, it is in the stacks of lumber at a mill in Montesano, it is in the planks at Olympic Stadium in Hoquiam, in the boats pulled up on the beach at Ocean City and in the totems at Taholah.
It began to come back to me when we crossed the Satsop River west of Elma on the Olympic Highway, the sloughy Chehalis on our left. We crossed the Wynoochee then the Wishkah and turned north, arriving at Big Spruce RV Park and Cabins, our base camp for the next two days of salmon fishing.
My friend Chris Sawiel, my dad and I checked into our cabins and rolled into our bunks. We had booked with Tom Moonan for two days. On the first day Chris and I would fish and film and on the second day we would be joined by friend Ben Winkelman, the mayor of Hoquiam. Dad would prospect on his own at some of the good banky water. This was the last week of September and a huge rainstorm had just rolled through. Ahead we could expect most of two days of sunshine before the next storm off the Pacific. We did not even have to look at the river to know its condition.
The anglers changed up baits as frequently as every four or five drifts.
Green and On The Drop
Upriver, Tom said, there were a lot of fish. For the last few days he had been riding out the high water on the upper drift and the fish had started to turn.
“We could get more fish up there,” he said, “but I think we can get brighter fish on the lower section.” His eyes flicked to me for confirmation. My hands were cupped around a hot mug of coffee. I nodded. If the choice is between fresh fish and greenies, give me chrome. This is the Olympic Peninsula. Riding that pillow of high water, these fish could be just a couple of days out of the salt. Kings in the tops of the run and coho in the slow bend pools and under the log jams.
Dad helped us launch the boat then he turned his headlights back toward the river road.
“Watch out for bears,” Moonan called after him. I could hear dad roll his eyes.
We pushed away from the gravel bar with the light from our headlamps. We were not the only ones.
Anglers from around the state, indeed from around the Northwest, from as far away as Idaho, had convened on this mid-week morning to float the river or prospect it from the banks. There was no question there were fresh fish. No one second-guessed the timing. The one thing not one of us knew was where the knots of fresh Chinook were to be found or which of a dozen or more slow corners might hold the biter coho.
While several anglers slipped down to get first water, we took our time, which pleased me. Do the different thing. But sometimes the different thing yields the same old results and soon we followed the flotilla downriver. There were eight river miles ahead. We would find the fish.
What Makes This Guide Tick?
A guide evaluates his or her clients. In most cases the client and guide do not know each other and they have to learn to work together, to think like a team. And the client evaluates the guide, too. It is a question of motivations. People come to the profession from different paths. Tom Moonan came out West in the army and, stationed at Fort Lewis, started to fish the good water that was within easy driving distance. After his hitch was over, he decided he would stay. Not long after that he had his guide license and a growing clientele.
I have started bringing my own rods on guided trips. Too many guides make use of crappy gear with worn out reels. I am done setting the hook on fish only to have the bail flip open. That doesn’t happen with my reels. But Moonan’s rods were all matched and clean and the reels looked like their owner at least cared a little bit.
In the bait box Moonan had at least four different colors of eggs, presumably with four different cures. And alongside the bait box was a veritable apothecary’s supply of bait scents, powders and oils and gels, some off-the-shelf and some of his own blends. Grimy bottles, each in its place, and a box of latex gloves. Okay, we are fishing with a guy who plays the game.
That a guide likes to fish is a given. At least they like it before they get their guide license. They better like getting up early and getting old before their time because that is going to happen too. And they learn that they cannot make up for their client’s deficiencies. The coaching starts well before daylight and continues all the way to the takeout.
Moonan was thinking two river bends ahead, evaluating in his mind where the downriver guys had got to already, where there might be an open slot full of grabby kings.
My polarized glasses were on now that the sun was well up and I peered into good looking water, trying to see into the holding lies, reading the water. We floated over one likely run where a half dozen kings streaked away from the boat. Moonan kept his eyes fixed downstream and I saw the reason why when we rounded the bend. A long riffle widened out of a narrows cut between a cliff on one side and a gravel bar on the other. Below the shallow riffle the river widened with frog water on one side and a deep run on the other. Classic stacking water below some bouldery goodness. Bear tracks on the sand bar.
One boat was parked there already and Moonan slid in right next to them, closer than I would have done, but then I learned Moonan had made sure he had done this river regular some favors in the past. It’s called social capital and with this transaction accomplished, Moonan nodded at me with a meaningful look.
“You know where to put it.”
I had already measured the cast, spot-ted the wall, guessed where the fish would be. I launched the cast, saw the bait splash in, allowed a heartbeat for the weight to touch bottom, turned the reel a crank to tighten up, and… The float stopped. I swung the rod up. The grab was solid, the bait must have dropped right in front of its face. Now with the hook set in the side of its mouth the fish turned and streaked down into the hole toward a tangle of alders. I stopped it by turning the rod on its side and felt the headshake. I had won the first round and when the fish began to fight in the middle of the river, I slid over the side of the boat and into the waist deep water. Moonan stood alongside with the net and when we, on the second pass across the sandbar, saw a clipped adipose, I got the fish’s head up and Moonan swooped in with the net.
There were other snappy kings in that run and we took turns with the neighbors, cheering them on when they had a bent rod and a fish to fight. But that was the only fish I was able to land, out of several hookups. We drifted down through shafts of sunlight filtered through the alders. In the next run we found another pod of kings but they had been spooked and were not interested in the offerings.
About half a dozen miles downriver we saw my dad waded out in coho water.
“Seen any bears?” Dad had not, but bear sign was in the parking lots and down along the river. What dad did have to show us was an eight-pound silver salmon he caught on a slow-thumped purple Wicked Lures spinner. The fish had been in the belly of the hole in a tangle of downed logs. Now it was in his cooler.
Back Again
In the morning Ben Winkelman arrived well before daylight and dozed in his car while we got up and made coffee.
An hour before dawn we slipped the boat into the river and instead of dallying at the top of the drift, bounced down into the dark under the light of the headlamps. Moonan’s thinking, and I concurred, was that we knew where there had been biters and there was a better than even chance they would still be there. We were not wrong.
Moonan had spent the previous afternoon collecting sand shrimp and now we added that to the cured eggs, sometimes with a Spin-N-Glo to top it off. I have become a firm believer that nothing beats the right cure for the day, whatever that is, and FRESH eggs. I start to lose faith in a bait after four drifts. Sometimes between switching baits I would freshen up the scent with a shot of Pro-Cure’s monster bite. And while I was doing that, Moonan would trim up the bait so that the offering was a compact ball.
We began at daylight in the hole that had produced for us on the first morning. I hooked one right away and lost it and Winkelman hooked and lost one too. I rowed up, parked the boat and fished the top of the slot by myself and missed and hooked and lost several fish before we decided to try a different tactic.
Moonan wanted to pull plugs in the hole. We knew the fish were there. If they would not fully commit to our baits (and if we could not get proper hook sets on the long lines) perhaps they would smash a plug. And that’s what happened. First the rod on my side bent over hard, but we missed that one. Winkelman got the next grab and soon he had a bright fin-clipped five-pound king in the boat. A fresh wound in the fish’s tail meant it had gotten away from some sharp-toothed critter before it met the mayor.
Turning Up the Heat
We slid down through several rapids and ahead of us was a sandbar where the river made a slow right-hand turn. Another boat was pulled up on the bank and we stayed a respectful distance from the anglers in the top of the run.
For the moment, this bend of the river was in the shade and there was room for at least a couple more guys on the beach.
Out of the boat, we timed our casts to fit into the rhythm of the guys at the top of the run. A fish rolled at the top of the run. Below us, in the slow water, a coho porpoised. Moonan returned to the boat to grab a bottle of scent. Our casts were on target and I tried to picture a pod of bright kings sucked into a depression in the gravel. There had been a few biters in the group. Something would trigger them to bite again.
Moonan applied a bit of scent and turned the bait back to Winkelman. “I’ll start off subtle and mild and try to get them to bite if I know that they are there,” he said.
“Sardine, anchovy, tuna belly, I bring it all. Something that is not necessarily going to be a threat to them. Then I’ll randomly throw something out there that will trigger that fight-or-flight syndrome, try to trigger that aggression bite.”
Winkelman’s casts were on target and the bait and scent seemed to be on target too. He hooked and lost several before bringing a nice finclipped king to the net.
Tom Moonan holds mayor Ben Winkelman’s hatchery king.
Our friends on the sandbar above us were getting ready to go when another boat slipped in. Two young guys, good fishermen rigged with beads, and soon they proved what we were just getting around to figuring out. It was time to switch to beads. The biters in that pod of fish just kept biting, as long as someone could anticipate what it was they were going to bite next.
We had seen the fish react to each new bait combination as we changed presentation, cure and attractant. Now they were going for beads.
We reeled up and began to stow our rods. We had turned a pod of unpressured fish into pressured fish, but they had kept biting.
“If you think about it, the bead is a magnified version of what is already going down the system. Especially with pressured fish, the salmon will still bite if the bead is matched with the proper hook size, naturally drifting in their field of view. It’s just natural.”
We have all had those days on the water when we see tempers get short. Maybe it’s the phase of the moon that does it to us, but what we saw on the Olympic Peninsula in September was fishermen from around the West, gathered to take part in the bounty of the ocean returning on each flush of tide. We saw river etiquette at its best, with guys who had just met that day offering each first water or a first cast on unpressured fish.
We saw wild kings and coho turned back and hatchery fish taken home. And above all, we drifted through the dark forest where moss hangs heavy in the trees and black bear pad softly out of the timber, where eagles feast on salmon on the gravel bars. You can almost hear the trees growing.
Gary Lewis is a co-author and publisher of Fishing Mt. Hood Country and Fishing Central Oregon. Visit garylewisout-doors.com.
NEW VIDEO
MORE GREAT ARTICLES FROM STS
FISHING GLOSSARY - CHRIS ELLIS
