Cathlamet to Willapa Bay on $300 a day

[Deleted User]

This has been a week of mishaps on fishing trips for me. Good things too though. I was scheduled to meet our Funny Fishing Story contest winner Dan Eerkes and friend Sean to fish for springers out of Cathlamet, Wash. today (it's past midnight - so yesterday on Thur). Dan's story was of flyfishing in Montana with Steve Probasco (editor of N.W. Flyfishing magazine). I'll try to find it and re-post it. Dan lives near the Willapa River so usually fishes the Columbia out of Cathlamet or Skamokawa. He had invited me to fish Thur., before we knew the nets would get extended thru the week. ... Anyway, driving my wife's car a little too fast thru dark rainy Longview I ran over a cement center divider and popped the 2 left tires - costing me $277 to replace, and being a couple hours late. http://www.ifish.net/forum/images/graemlins/mad.gif http://www.ifish.net/forum/images/graemlins/rolleyes.gif ... Meanwhile at the Cathlamet boat basin, Dan and his friend Sean are trying to fix a balking OB motor (it's first trip after the winter layover). We finally went to a parts store and bought all new plugs, fuel filters, water separators, etc., but nothing we did could get that thing running close to well enough to venture over to Puget Island to troll for a lucky springer that might have gotten around the nets. Dan and I had planned to fish the Columbia half the day and then do a fishing tour of the rivers on the way toward his place the other half day. But he wound up having to tow his boat to Longview for repair. So, with jigs and spinning rod in the trunk I headed to tour the rivers to the west. The first I fished was the well known Elochaman. The first hole I fished I landed a bright 8 to 9 lb. buck nate, hooked on the 3rd cast with a Silent Approach 1/8th oz. black & cerise jig. You regulars there will recognize the rusty $1 box as to where this was. I fished several other good looking holes on up the river but no other bites. I then fished a couple of nice holes on the Gray's River with no bites, and left due to lack of bank access. The streams in this area have very long tidewater sections that would be good to explore and fish for fall salmon. Some interesting looking creeks too. It was still only early afternoon so on I went for several miles west. I was really sleepy so when I drove up a road toward a hatchery I pulled over to take a nap. During this I had a great dream! In it I drove way up this river on a paved road that turned into a gravel road way out in nowhere. It was a beautiful remote wilderness type area that seemingly few fishers would go, I thought in my dream. I just kept driving up the gravel road marveling at the deep canyons and clear but emerald green pools and rapids of this imaginary river. On up I went. Over a wooden bridge toward the upper watershed. Beautiful! I dreamt that this could be cataraft heaven if it had big runs of salmon and steelhead in it. My dream continued back down river as I stopped and fished a few gorgeous pools of good looking holding water. I didn't hook anything; and that's just as well because if I had it might have waken me up. Well I eventually woke up and still had plenty of time for fishing. So I went back toward the highway and stopped to fish some good looking holes in a nearby river. I did get another steelhead on for several seconds before the hook pulled free (not dreaming this!). It was on a beaded jig Mark Anderson made. No other bites. As it became late afternoon I headed for Astoria across the bridge, to take a different route home. Crossing about 6 p.m. I saw several gillnet boats working above the bridge and on up to Tongue Point. I've heard that they are to stop netting Friday morning now. I hope so! ... After a bad start, this turned out to be a fun and enlightening trip! Dan uses his small 8 ft. cataraft on his home river and we are going to cat these other rivers together next fall and winter - since they will soon close for this season. Due to some criminal types lurking in that general area I will add more than just a motion triggered alarm to my rig - I am getting a tiny motion triggered 4 direction cam to help catch a lowlife. Rigs are getting broken into on the Wilson River too. - RT

[Barnyard]

R.T. what was the pressure on the Eloc. like...Did you fish beaver creek...

[skunkmaster]

RT does Sean have a crab boat out of Westport,Sean sounds like my brother he has a crewman named Dan who is buddys with Probasco.Judging from the story this sounds like Sean his wife calls him Mr Magoo becouse somthing always goes wrong.
Thanks.

[Deleted User]

Barney - I saw nobody on the Elochoman. I saw 2 fishers on the lower Grays and 3 fishers on the lower Snake river. And I checked these out pretty good, so the pressure is low. One told me the rivers there close March 15. I don't have the WA regs handy - is that correct? ...

sm - Likely a connection there because Dan is a commercial crabber and commercial fishes in Alaska. He only sportfishes salmon & steelhead down here though. But a few commercials in the boat basin knew him. The commercial fishers heading out late (most were already out there) were the stereotypical inbred, public master baiting, filthy clothed, ugly, bad breathed, 42 IQ'd geeks ... hey, just kidding you guys - you know I love ya. And you know how I really feel about gillnetting salmon http://www.ifish.net/forum/images/graemlins/grin.gif . Dan and Sean are great guys.

RT

[scooby]

The elochoman, and grays both close on march 15th - most of the smaller ones close on Feb 28/9 these days.

scooby out

[Deleted User]

I couldn't access the old DB to find this funny fishing story by Dan Eerkes, but I finally found it by looking thru my 8" high pile of pages for my book manuscript. I will repost it here. Thanks for the good story Dan:
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I was fighing Cliff Lake off SW Montana's Madison River several years ago. Cliff Lake is legendary for it's big browns and rainbows (held the Montana state record with a 28 lb. brown for a few years). So my partner and I were jacked for the possibility of getting a tow by one of these brutes in out float tubes. However, Cliff is a deep, deep lake and we were using everything we had to get our flies down 30 to 40 feet into the "zone". With anticipation still riding high, we kicked past an anchored jon boat grossly overloaded with several cowboy hatted adults, 5 or 6 rugrats, a couple of mangy dogs, cooler, a veritable briar patch of spinning rods, AND a stringer of fish that looked like something out of my Grandpa's photo album of salmon fishing off Puget Sound's Pt. No Pt. in the 1920's.

Trying to sound nonchalant, while also drooling a tad, I cast out the proverbial "How's fishing?" to the mob. Actually I was ready to ply these local worm dunkers for all the information I could wring out of them ... depth, bait, etc. Being a "purist, snobby, flyfisherman", I wasn't going to allow those worm chuckers the satisfaction of knowing that their Powerbait encrusted snelled baithooks from the local True Value store were kicking the crap out of my Orvivs, Sage, and Scientific Anglers blah blah blah setup, towing the perfectly tied hellioandropomorphic sculpin pattern indigenous to that enviroment. (How's that for fly lingo?).

Anyway, I was rewarded with a reply of "Great fishing! Daddy, hold up my fish" from a beaming little girl about age 8. Well "Daddy", with true Montana hospitality, smiled and pulled up an obnoxious vine of trout, none under 18" and one (which I think was the little girl's catch) looked to push the 30" mark! It was truely a thing of beauty and a Kodak moment ... except that when Grandma was snapping a picture of little Debbie and her monster trout, one of the overloaded chain links, of the 99 cent K-Mart stringer hangin from Daddy's hand, decided to relieve 20-some pounds of rainbow trout induced stress on it!

When those fish fell in the water a numb silence fell over the boat for a second and then, with looks of horror, pure pandemoneum busted loose! Dogs and cowboy hats flew in the water, Grandpa and Daddy lunged in vain at prized trout, Mom and Grandma were screaming at everyone to sit down, the camera went for a swim ..... just PURE HELL for 10 seconds. It all subsided until Daddy said to the now devastated little girl that "It's alright honey, you'll catch another good fish". ... "NO IT'S NOT" she wailed back, "WE'LL NEVER CATCH ANOTHER ONE AND IT'S ALL HIS FAULT!". Of course she was pointing directly at me. I wanted to just shrink and disappear, but of course I couldn't get too far too fast in my float tube ... so, I had the unpleasant experience of watching the little girl bore holes in my tube with angry eyes, while her family retrieved their pooches and bailed the old jon boat.

As they pulled up anchor and fired up their old outboard to head back to what would probably be a somber camp, my partner was laughing his head off. I felt horrible for inadvertantly ruining a little girl's big fishing day. And probably scaring her for life by turning her into a man-hating, float tube despising, angry assasin of anyone toting a damned flyrod - woman.

Anyhow, there is something to be said for karma, since I spent 6 more days in the flyfishing paradise of Montana and could only hook a couple whitefish. The fish gods had their revenge. My partner that day, Steve Probasco, never fails to revive that story when he puts on a slide show for a fly club or hosts his booth at a sportsman's expo. I still feel like an ass about it.