About this time each year I take my annual trip up my favorite childhood creek. The creek is better for fishing later in the year, but it is such a nursery for Salmon and Steelhead smolts that I feel it wildly unethical to fish it anytime but this time, when the smolts have yet to hatch. This is a fairly unique creek, during the winter it gets good flows throughout its run but in the summer it gets very shallow, so shallow that about halfway between its confluence with the lower Quinault River and its headwaters it dries up completely. Because of this drying up it retains a fairly good population of resident cutthroat and rainbows.
This creek holds a very special place in my heart as it is the place where I cut my very first baby teeth in the fishing world. Although I grew my canines and molars on the steelhead and salmon filled rivers that drain the Olympics, usually under the guidance of my father, this small spring fed creek is the first place where I ventured out on my own, away from parents watching eyes. Most people don't fish it because the fish are tiny, rarely scaling ten inches, very spooky, and its hard as hell to reach the decent fly water.
The creek is almost all pocket water, and although during the fall when the sea-runs and steelhead ascend it I like to dead drift weighted stone flies, I mostly fish dries for the small residents. It's not a fertile stream so anything buggy looking gets the job done, my favorite small creek patterns are a royal coachman and a deer hair ant, the ant fall of early summer is probably the only important "hatch" one has to match on streams like these. This particular evening I chose a #12 coachman and worked my way up the creek.
On the crystal clear headwaters of the Olympics one must fish like a hunting heron. Upstream presentations are the rule, and a low profile and quite steps are solid keys to success. To be complete honest I wasn't expecting to catch many fish. I was pretty green with my fly rod the last time I fly fished this creek, and I only got one trout of 8 inches to hand. Today my fortune was much greater however, the first fish was a beautifully spotted 10 inch cutthroat that took at the edge of a log jam. It was fat and several caddis flies fell out of its mouth when I picked it out of the water. This was a very good sign of fish to come.
I picked my way up the creek bringing several smaller trout to hand, soon I reached my destination. A very nice run that was an hour and a half of rock hoping from the trail that met the creek. It was a wide slick with a giant boulder in the middle. Most of the slick was very shallow, but on the left side of the boulder the water deepened quickly, reaching almost 12 feet at the boulders foot. I made an upstream cast and watched the white wings of my coachman expectantly. The trout took my fly just as it came under the shadow of the boulder, it took with a gentle sip.. This is significant because the small fish of this creek typically make splashy swipes at a fly, I set the hook with a sharp strip of the line and confirmed my initial though. This was a big fish.
The trout exploded out of the water almost instantly, and then made a terrific run to the pool upstream. I rock hopped my way to him and played him into a shallow eddy where I tailed him quickly. He was a beautiful fish, a leopard of a rainbow in both size and spot pattern, he probably measured 15 inches and was very deep bodied. I whispered a silent thank you to my childhood creek and watched the beautiful fish swim back into is waters.
I sat on a rock at the tail of the pool wondering at the beauty of the Olympic Rainforest when I noticed a carpenter ant on the rock. I picked him up and flicked him into the slick with the big boulder. I watched as he drifted toward the tail out of the deep hole by the boulder when I saw a trout even bigger than the one I just landed slurp him from the water film. I tried several cast into the slick but the big guy was not having it.
I'll see you next year. I thought as I turned to head home.
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