The Quality of the Drift

Concho · 07-31-2005, 02:34 AM

Thanks to all of you who have been so welcoming and kind with your comments concerning my musings about drift fishing. It�s 101 degrees today in Richland In The Desert. I wish I were fishing someplace cool. I�ve only been outside today for an early morning walk along the Columbia, to water my persimmon trees, and to pick a box of tomatoes from the garden for my cousin Ann.

The last post, titled "Drift Fishing", ended with a fishing encounter with another drift fisherman at the Cracker Bar on the Sky in the late 70s when the importance of The Quality of the Drift was demonstrated to me.

In the first half of the eighties, through the Fall and Winter of 1985, I fished my home waters on the Sky from October through the first half of January. I spent a lot of time fishing for moving hatchery Steelhead , fresh into the river, below the Dairy Farm at Monroe.

The summer runs were a different matter, in different places. Wilder places. The summer runs were a different life. Was that me?

I fished the Dairy Farm water by myself for big fresh Chum that entered the river with the October rains. One October I landed a hog that weighed 24 � pounds cleaned and bled when we weighed it at the sporting goods store. The fish whole might have been the state record at the time.. Of course one wouldn�t have particularly wanted to be known as the guy that caught the state record Chum..

Beautiful Chum turn quickly to dogs and Chum were universally loathed by the Steelheaders that appeared on the river in December with the arrival of the first hatchery Steelhead bound for Reiter.

Over time I developed control over my line and it changed my drift fishing. From that time I have drift fished very effectively. I learned to use a piece of pencil lead just the right weight so I could control the drift of the line, raising or lowering the line in the water column, and thus the rig at its end. I did that through increasing or decreasing line tension at the rod tip and by moving the rod tip. Say I�m swinging the line down through a drift, following the line with the rod tip, and keeping the line tension pretty constant so the bait cruises smoothly along just off the bottom, or so I hope. I wonder if maybe I�m getting too high. So I drop the rod tip a bit, maybe feed a little line from the reel with my thumb, decreasing tension in the line to drop down and probe for the bottom. Then by raising the rod tip and increasing tension in the line, I can bring the lead back up a bit and swim the bait along in a smooth drift just above the rocks, or so it is hoped.

The guy I met at the Cracker Bar in the late seventies who impressed me with the quality of his drift might have been fishing a controlled line. He made a statement that he preferred 15# test because he got "a better push� with a heavier line. It does seem like push is your friend in controlling the line and heavier line is easier to control.

I can�t write about he 80s without mentioning Blue. Blue followed me home from the park on a Spring morning in 1986. I was riding my mountain bike and he ran beside me. He almost got killed crossing 145th and the driver yelled at me. I yelled back that he wasn�t my dog. I was mistaken.

Blue was about one year old, looking like a first generation cross between a pointer and a Lab. He woke the bird lust in me and changed my life. My days on the Skykomish ended forever.

Blue grew into a great pheasant dog. He had a fantastic pointer nose and a great Lab heart. He hunted with total seriousness and intensity. He was a lover at home but wanted zero touching or affection on a hunting trip. He didn�t want to be praised for a good retrieve. It was as if any closeness or affection or praise would have been inappropriate to the importance of the hunt.

One Blue story.

We were on a hard six hour sweep down the back country into the vehicle free zone from where Dodson road crosses the Winchester Wasteway. It turned out hot that October day. We were on the way back to the rig with two roosters in my vest and my water bottle dry. I was thirsty.

Blue got up a rooster. I dropped him wing broke at the edge of a big cattail patch. The rooster ducked instantly into the cattail patch and Blue went in after him. Blue didn�t come back and I settled down in the dappled shade of a Russian Olive to wait.

Fifteen minutes went by, then it was a half hour. It was hot and getting thirstier out. I was worried about Blue. I happened to be looking that direction and saw a black dog topping a sand dune a quarter mile away. It took him another twenty minutes to back track all the way to me, coming out of the cattails with the rooster the same place he went in.

God, Blue had heart!

He was in bad shape. He delivered the rooster to hand, dug himself a quick hole in the poor shade and collapsed into it panting hard and looking terrible. We suffered there together for a quarter hour till he looked a little better. I made him stand up and took him to the nearest pond.

Blue had to retire when he was six years old. Hunting roosters in the desert wetlands of Eastern Washington is hard on a flushing dog. And the more drive they have the harder it is on them. Blue could have hunted for another few years if he had learned to pace himself. But he couldn�t do that.

I didn�t go back to the Sky after Blue retired in 1990, spending as much as possible of my time Falls and Winters over on the coast, wading and drift fishing the Queets and the Hoh when they were in shape, fishing smaller streams if they were not. I fished mostly for summer runs during the last five years of the 80s when Blue and I hunted together.

I went back to the Stilly in the late eighties for parts of two summers. My sometime fishing partner Steve stopped drift fishing and took up fly fishing. He went up on the Stilly for the summer runs and did real well. He talked me into getting re-outfitted with fly gear and going up myself.

Actually I wasn�t much of a fly fisherman, as far as mastery of the gear is concerned. But there were a lot of fish and I could get to them with a short line. I did well in the two summers �Return to the Stilly� was playing, catching more than enough fish, some of which were very fine. I lost one monster, a chrome buck over twenty pounds.

There is a big slide up on the North Fork. The slide was stable for the first of the two summers in the eighties I fished the Stilly. But it slides big some years and does a lot of damage to the fishery. The hole where I hooked the huge buck was right at the base of the slide. It�s long gone. Steve tells me that whole part of the river is changed now.

Fly fishing the Stilly I tried to get a good smooth controlled drift, like I would have done had I been using drift gear. Actually, that part was relatively easy. In some ways it is easier to get a smooth controlled drift with a fly line than with a casting line. Push is your friend and a fly line has a world of push. What�s harder is getting down.

I waded out to get within easy range of the deep holding water along the base of the slide, casting a bit upstream and throwing a big loop into the line. I walked downstream after each cast to get down a little more I stripped out line and worked that in when I could get away with it. After I had gotten all the depth I was going to get out of the sink tip line, though not always all I wanted, I used the rod tip to maintain tension in following the line to swim it and the fly smoothly and evenly and as slowly as I could manage down and back across the current. Since the line was so thick, it got a big push from the water and controlling the line was a much larger scale physical activity than controlling the mono line in drift fishing, which requires far less work in smaller and more precise movements.

The huge buck rolled and showed himself as soon as he hooked himself against the drag of the line. He turned and ran downstream to the tail of the hole, getting well into the backing. He stopped there, being unwilling to go over the riffle. I got to the bank and followed him down, recovering backing and line as I went. About the time I got close to the tail out he turned and ran back upstream toward the head of the hole, breaking the 10# test tippet against the drag of the fly line. I suspect an experienced and skilled fly fisherman would not have crackered off that fish.