Editor’s note: Seth Norman is taking time off from his column, “The Master of Meander.” Until he returns, we’re treating you to provocative work that, like Seth’s, gets beneath the surface of our sport.
Deep in the redwoods, a rainstorm is lashing the trees and saturating the ground. Raindrops are shaking out of a canopy of tall spires, bouncing off conifer fronds, dropping onto an understory of vine maples and tanoak, and soaking ferns, sorrel, and ground duff. It is impossible to tell how many bounces these raindrops are getting before they hit the forest floor. The loudest ones are hitting the hood of my rain jacket.
Somewhere within the sound of the downpour, a creek gurgles like a Bach fugue. The polyphonic hum is steady, but never precisely the same. I hear bright treble sounds and a bass undertone in the creek. Rearrange the cobblestones, and the chords might change. Plunge your head underwater, and the sounds would disappear. A little farther on, and the creek’s music is absorbed into a louder drone coming from the big river flowing just beyond the trees.
Emerging from the dark grove, I see that the river is already turbid. Yesterday it was green — not emerald, but a lighter, softer shade that a friend calls “steelhead green.” Now the river is changing to a much milkier hue. There is maybe an hour of fishing left before the blowout. I cross the gravel bar that gleams in the rain. I figure to find steelhead holding closer to the banks as the swollen river rises. But my casts are in vain. That’s winter steelhead fishing for you. Après nous, le déluge. Whatever it may be, fishing for steelhead in California isn’t comfortable. It’s mainly a winter fishery, and that means cold, wind, and rain. Assuming, some years, that it rains at all. Our steelhead season extends roughly from late autumn through early spring. You are fishing either at flood stage or in a biblical drought.
This is a sport for masochists.
I was not prepared psychologically for the pursuit of winter steelhead. In rainy years, our rivers blow out in the middle of the best steelhead runs. And they can take up to two weeks to clear. Just in time for another Pacific storm to move in. In drought years, which tend to be cyclical and more frequent these days, thanks to climate change, rivers can run as low as they do in midsummer and might even be closed to fishing. On smaller coastal streams, the sandbars at the mouths don’t even break open. One searches in vain for that prime green color steelhead anglers love.
As a new arrival to the Bay Area, I was drawn first to the nearby Russian River, which wends its way through lush vineyards, dark redwood groves in its lower reaches, and finally past peaceful dairy farms in a rendezvous with the sea at Jenner. I caught steelhead at Johnson’s Beach in Guerneville and farther downstream at Watson’s Log and in the Austin Riffle near the Cassini Ranch. I enjoyed the funky little river towns and the redwoods, which were second-growth, but magical. They could be a little foreboding, too. Even in summer, the fog could make walking in a grove feel like winter in Seattle.
By Christmas, I would be fishing the Gualala River in a small, remote canyon a little farther up the coast. The green pools and banks were sheltered by a sylvan screen of second-growth redwoods. Later in the season, I would make longer trips north to the Eel River, in Humboldt County, and to the Smith River, close by the Oregon border. Here were virgin old-growth forests that had never been logged. The ancient redwoods were like something out of a fairytale, with medieval mists and giants to haunt your dreams — so tall against the sky, so dense and crowded in their high canopies. There were patches of ground beneath them that never got sunlight, and little grew in the eternal shade. But where sunlight reached down to the ground, other trees rose upward: young redwoods, Douglas firs, tanoaks, alders, bay laurels, vine maples, and an explosion of ferns, emerald sorrel, and velvet moss. It was a privilege to stand in those cathedrals and to fish while looking at the world’s tallest trees.
I was pretty green myself and learned how to do this mostly through trial and error. When it comes to fishing, I am a poet and a loafer first, and only then a scientific angler. That‘s a biographical fact, not a recommendation. I wasn’t quite prepared for what it took to catch steelhead.
It has been said that the single most important thing a fly fisher can know is the character and quality of the rivers he or she fishes. You have to know where fish are in a given stream at different times, when they are feeding (if at all, in the case of steelhead), and why they act the way they do.
California’s winter season usually begins with the first rains in autumn. Sandbars at the river mouths break open, allowing steelhead to enter from the ocean. They are sea-going rainbow trout that have returned to spawn. As the rivers rise with the rain, steelhead leave the lower tidal pools and make their way upstream on a journey to their natal spawning grounds. These departing fish are replaced in the pools by fresh steelhead. The fish will arrive in stages throughout the winter, with the heaviest runs occurring in January and February. Many streams host runs of fresh winter steelhead into March and April.
I found that the best fishing typically came a few days after a freshet, as the rivers began to drop and turn a light shade of green. Then steelhead would grab a fly with relative abandon. As the rivers dropped and became clearer, steelhead spooked and became harder to catch.
In time, I learned to read the rivers. Steelhead would be holding in long, even riffles, in the shallow tail ends of the pools, and in the pools themselves. Winter steelhead hardly ever would hold in the faster water at the head of a pool. They would favor those places in the river where they could find refuge and a place to rest from the current. At high water, they would edge closer to the riverbanks. At low water, they would sidle into deeper pools.
Unlike summer fish, winter steelhead would not rise to take a dry fly. They would hold close to the bottom, and because their metabolisms worked slower in colder water, they would not chase flies as far or as aggressively as summer fish.
And it took rather long casts to reach them. Shooting heads and weight-forward sinking lines were de rigueur. These powerful lines could reach the steelhead and put the fly at their level. I found that I could get by with only one rod, but needed three different kinds of fly lines to fish effectively: quick sink, medium sink, and slow sink. Which line I chose depended on the depth and speed of the river. In moderate depth and current, a medium-sinking line worked best. It allowed me to reach the steelhead, but not get hung up on the bottom. In faster, deeper water, a quick-sinking line was the way to go. It got the fly down to the fish before the faster current overhead swept it away. The slow-sinking line was for shallow pools with low flows, such as you might find in a lagoon or a tidal pool. Here a strip retrieve worked best.
The rod itself had to be at least 9 feet in length and throw at minimum an 8-weight line. Heavier was better. (This was before Spey rods became popular on steelhead streams.) The rod needed enough backbone to lift and subdue a thrashing steelhead. And the reel had to be large enough to hold sufficient backing and have a drag smooth enough to prevent backlash.
More important than my rig were my clothes. I found that my interest in fishing evaporated the moment I got cold. So I had to outfit myself in insulated chest waders, a rain jacket, thermal underwear, ski socks, fingerless woolen gloves to keep my wet hands warm, and a complete change of clothing in case I took a dunking, which could be life-threatening in cold weather. All this was a considerable outlay.
Fortunately, I could get by with only four types of flies: big, small, bright, dark. Patterns didn’t matter. What mattered was how I presented and manipulated the fly. Other than knowing where steelhead are in a river, the most important thing any angler can do to catch them is to control the action of the fly. The fly has to move at different depths and in changing currents. When the river was high
and somewhat murky, I would choose a substantially large fly with a bit of flash to give the fish a good look. As the river lowered and turned clearer, that was the time to switch to a smaller, more subdued fly on a much longer leader. Low-water fishing was always a challenge, because steelhead spook easily in clear water. But I found that with long leaders, small flies, and a delicate approach, I could sometimes catch one when gear fishermen went bust. Whatever the conditions, the trick was to impart a little lifelike motion into the fly on its drift through the pool.
The protocol for fishing a steelhead pool was fairly straightforward. Start at the head, as high upstream as steelhead might be holding. Wade out and make a short cast. Gradually lengthen those casts until I reached my natural limit on distance. After my longest cast, I would then take several steps downstream and cast far out again. And repeat this until I came to the end of the pool. That way, I would cover all the water within my reach.
To control the depth of my fly on the swing, I would mend my line or change the direction of the cast. I’d angle it slightly upstream if I wanted it to go deeper, downstream if I wanted the fly to ride a little higher. And keep working my way down the pool until the magic happened. All this presupposed that crowds weren’t gang-holing the pools and that the river hadn’t turned into a showroom for drift boats. This was California, after all. The last thing you were ever likely to hear on a California steelhead river was, “After you, my dear Alphonse.” The bankside guide to etiquette was written by
Bill Schaadt, not Emily Post.
So there you are, below the forks of the Smith River. It’s a perfect winter day. The water has greened up. Sunlight illuminates the redwood forest. The river glows with the same strangely received light. The otherworldly hue is a combination of sylvan reflections and a mineral in the bedrock called serpentine. The silence of a virgin forest, the solemnity of ancient trees striped in shadows — it all serves to temper the frustration you feel as yet another drift boat crosses your line.
As if the crowding isn’t enough to make you chuck your rod and take up bird watching, there are those Pacific storms. Yet another would roll in and blow out all the rivers at the moment the fishing got any good. It was as inevitable as death and taxes. As I said, it takes our rivers about two weeks to come back into shape — the sole exception being the Smith, which can clear in a week because there are no dams on the river and its redwoods weren’t too badly logged in the headwaters.
When I first started fly fishing for steelhead, I would make trips up to the Eel River because it had a certain legendary status as the birthplace of fly fishing for Chinook salmon and winter steelhead. It was exciting to imagine yourself part of a tradition. Fly fishing has always been at the nexus of ecology and human experience. But when it rained, the Eel would go from steelhead green to brown almost within minutes. It was as if the river were carrying a load of diarrhea. Or so it seemed to me.
If the first rule of fly fishing is to know your river, the second might be to know your forest. An understanding of the symbiotic relationship between a forest and a stream helps us comprehend why coastal steelhead rivers act the way they do. Thick, lush redwood forests stabilize riverbanks and eroding hillsides and provide shade and a cold-water haven for fish. The transpiring redwoods can affect coastal weather, and fallen trees can even shape a river’s course. On its journey to the sea, the Eel passes through old-growth redwood reserves that are under state and federal protection. But most of the watershed is on private lands, managed for timber production, ranch and dairy farming, and other commercial enterprises, including pot cultivation.
I saw the tragic effects of this while fishing in discolored water whenever it rained. In time, like most other fly fishers I knew, I gave up on the Eel, bypassing it entirely for a trip farther north to the Smith River. Although the Smith was in spectacular shape, the problem was the crowds, especially the commercial driftboat traffic below the Forks. And then something extraordinary happened.
Salmon and steelhead started returning to the Eel River. The Eel had been on the decline ever since the infamous Christmas flood of 1964 knocked the Pacific Northwest on its ass, threw most of Northern California’s rivers out of whack, and nearly wiped out the anadromous runs on the Eel. But now the numbers of salmon and steelhead returning to the Eel were steadily on the rise. Logging practices had improved over time. Fishing pressure had eased up. And there were no hatcheries on the Eel — a big deal — so these were all wild steelhead and salmon. If ever a California river was primed for a comeback and a return to nature’s abundance, it was the Eel, according to California Trout, a conservation organization made up mainly of fly fishers. And so CalTrout has embarked with other grassroots groups on an ambitious estuary-to-headwaters program to restore the Eel’s wetlands at the mouth of the river, ensure adequate stream flows from the headwaters to the sea, remove barriers to the upstream migration of fish, and have a voice in dam relicensing. If this proves successful, it’ll be a shaft of light come down from the heavens to light up the forest.
Yet I fear that our sport, our fishing culture, our traditions, might be on their way out. Steelhead are charismatic fish. The ancient Greeks believed that charisma is a gift of the gods — and like all divine gifts, it comes at a cost. Maybe what steelhead offer to us is more than we can deliver to them. No grassroots efforts, no matter how conscientious or effective, can fix problems of a global nature, such as climate change and the collapse of our oceanic fisheries. That will take a much bigger fix. Maybe even a change in human nature. And the truth is that California’s glory days of fishing were gone long before I ever showed up on the West Coast. In fact, it was already on its way out way back in the 1960s, in those mellow-yellow hippie-dippy days when Big Brother and the Holding Company and other rockers were jamming and getting trashed on the banks of the Russian River. The Russian, Gualala, Eel, Klamath, Trinity . . . they were already remnants of what they had been in the historical past, although the music was better than ever.
In time, discouraged by crowds and unfavorable conditions, I found myself spending fewer days angling for steelhead in California and more time seeking them elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest. It wasn’t until I got to British Columbia that I learned a pretty astounding fact. I had always believed that steelhead are hard to catch — “the fish of a thousand casts.” That turns out to be untrue. Where they swim in abundant numbers, as they do in BC’s rivers, they’re relatively easy to take on a fly rod. Amazingly, this was once the case in California, too.
Things are not looking good in our Golden State. A grim picture is emerging of the sorry status of salmonids in California. Last spring, a report was issued by the University of California, Davis, that warns of things to come. Its authors were the eminent fisheries biologist Dr. Peter Moyle, who works for the university’s Center for Watershed Sciences, his colleague, Dr. Robert Lusardi, and California Trout’s conservation program coordinator, Patrick J. Samuel. And it’s as dark as anything written by Aeschylus. Their study projects that if current trends continue, many salmonid populations are unlikely to survive beyond this century. California is home to 31 genetically distinct species of salmon and trout — and 23 of them are at risk of blinking out.
Rising temperatures, dams, and agricultural production pose the greatest threats to these fish, according to the report, which is titled State of the Salmonids II: Fish in Hot Water. Wild Chinook salmon could all but disappear. Some problems, such as degraded river habitat and diversions for irrigation, might be reversed, but climate change, already underway, threatens to decimate California’s trout and salmon stocks. As the earth warms, there will be less snow and cold water in the mountains where rivers begin, and many waterways will become too warm for trout and salmon to tolerate. Irrigation for fruits and vegetables, marijuana, and wine also threatens their survival.
I see this on the Russian River, my home water. Once, the Russian hosted a winter run of up to thirty thousand wild steelhead. That was in the middle of the last century. But there came dams, logging, urban and suburban sprawl, gravel mining, and finally viniculture. Wells that irrigate vineyards have lowered the entire water table in the valley. And this has dropped the water table at elevation, too, drying up the creeks in the foothills where salmon and steelhead go to spawn. It’s hard to believe these fish have any future in the Russian River. One could read the entire history of America’s westward expansion in this one river valley alone. We thought we had conquered the land, only to find that we had defeated ourselves.
The most important thing a fly fisher can know is the character and quality of a river. But the essential thing is to have a river to fish in. We feel that we pass through time. But it is time that passes through us. These days, the current feels swifter and stranger than ever and more implacable. We know what is coming after us, but we can do little to stop it. Après nous, le déluge.
Thomas McGuane wrote: “Wherever you go in steelhead country, there will be a remarkably high number of San Franciscans, because their home fishery has all but disappeared.” “After us, the Flood,” said Madame de Pompadour. “Get it while you can,” sang Janis Joplin.
