The Pilings

If you’ve ever been to Lake Quinault, chances are you know about the pilings. At first glance you’d think they were drowned timber, which wouldn’t be surprising in a lake at the head of a rainforest valley, but on closer inspection they reveal themselves as what they are, man-made wooden poles stuck into the lake bottom, jutting out of the water with mismatched heights and uneven intervals, a grotesque scar on the serene glacially carved lake. They are all over the lake, especially on the south shore, but the majority of them mark the outlet where the Quinault River continues its journey seaward.

I’m honestly not sure what they were put there for, although I am sure it has something to do with early logging endeavors. I’ve always hated them, they are a mark on the unfortunate necessity that logging has always been to this struggling timber town. So when my original plans to spend Tuesday morning trolling the lake fell through and I suddenly had no boat to drag flies behind, I was more than a little put-off. Never to be deterred, I still strung up my rod, pulled on my waders, and went fishing.

Unfortunately for me, the hands down best place to fish the lake from shore is the lower mouth(although it’s all private property, lucky for me that property belongs to my uncle.), where you have a front seat view of those ugly pilings. One thing that can be said for those pilings is that they are fish attracting machines. All that surface area creates a lot of plant life, sockeye fry love this part of the lake in the early and late portions of the day, it’s not uncommon to see a whole school of them swimming with the bow of your boat. This also happens to be just upriver from the spot the tribal hatchery dumps all their coho and steelhead smolts.

To further dampen my mood I didn’t have the fly I wanted. I have been busy fabricating Rangeley style streamers for tolling, and while these flies have proven to be effective thus far this year, they aren’t the best flies for ripping though structure and weed beds. I have a minnow pattern that’s tied with olive teal flank that is my go-to fly in these situations, but I don’t have any tied up at the moment. I settled for the old staple, the muddler minnow, and waded to my waist, five weight in hand.

My favorite part about this spot is that most of the feeding here early in the morning happens in the upper ten feet or so of water. This lets me leave the lead line at home and use a buoyant fly. I don’t have the eyesight to fish dries in stillwater, so this is as close as I get to dry fly fishing on this lake, and there is nothing as exhilarating as watching a five pound dolly come out of the water, streamer in tooth.

I like to work lakes by starting at a terminal point on the shore line and casting in a fan pattern, covering every inch of water possible. I cut my fly fishing teeth on a wet fly swing, and the steelheader in me just won’t allow me to leave water un probed, so I made my first cast right on the legal line between the lake and lower river. I use a pretty erratic strip when working the piles, sockeye school in huge numbers sometimes, and the weakest looking fish usually gets eaten. I picked this thought processes up mooching for salmon in Sitka. When there are five thousand herring in a ball, you want to have the salesmanship to convince that King Salmon that your herring is the easiest one to catch.

It was probably around fifteen casts before the first hit. It was a sharp light tug that I missed. Two casts later I was into a fish. I knew it was cutthroat ten seconds into the fight when it porpoised part way out of the water. I couldn’t see its black spotted flanks in the morning gloom, but Dollys never jump, and more often than not they make one sustained run in the opposite direction of you, then come tidily to hand. This little 12 inch trout had no such plans. He made several sharking runs from side to side and a brilliant leap just before I brought him in. He was gorgeous, colored up from the glacial silt the way many early season trout are in the lake. His red throat slits stood in start contrast to his forest green back and sparse black spots decorated his sides. I let him slide from my hand and gazed toward the pilings.

It’s funny how catching a wild cutthroat can change your attitude toward a certain place.