As an angler I’ve always enjoyed variety. Nothing pleases me more than setting off for a stream or lake I haven’t tried before. The act of exploring is central to the fly-fishing experience, reflecting both our curiosity about the natural world and a desire to test our skills in a new context. If we develop a fresh tactical approach in the bargain, so much the better. Yet there’s also much to be gained by concentrating your efforts on a single river, as I once did with the Russian, renting a trailer on its banks for five years and learning to anticipate its moods, interacting with it as a living presence.
My trailer was on a 14-acre vineyard, and I had a quarter mile or so of the river pretty much to myself. The Russian flows for roughly 110 miles from its headwaters in the mountains north of Redwood Valley to Jenner on the Pacific. During the hot summer months, it’s a slow green stream thick with algae, ideal habitat for bottom-feeding suckers and carp. But when the winter rains come it grows wide and deep and looks majestic, often flooding its banks. The river gets its name from the Siberian fur traders who decimated the area’s sea lion population in the 19th century, leasing land from the Pomo in exchange for blankets, horses, axes, and beads. Long before my time, the Russian used to have robust runs of salmon and striped bass. I heard rumors of a few coho and Chinook still being caught, but I never saw the evidence. For most anglers in the valley, smallmouths and steelhead were the primary game fish. The first steelies of the season were usually taken in the lower river around Guerneville and Duncans Mills. Where I lived, they seldom turned up until after Thanksgiving, when the winter storms washed away the sandbar at the river’s mouth and the bigger fish could make their way upstream.
I knew nothing about steelhead when I moved in, but I soon learned they’re sea-going rainbows closely related to the Pacific salmons of the genus Oncorhynchus. They frequent the same waters as the salmon, yet they’re rarely snared in a commercial net. Nobody can explain why they’re so elusive. Their ocean wandering is also mysterious and difficult for biologists to track. They travel great distances, off to the Bering Sea or Baja or even Japan, before returning to their natal stream to spawn, recognizing it by its unique chemical composition. I’d caught lots of trout in the Sierra, so I assumed I’d make the transition to steelhead with ease, but I was dead wrong. They’re terrific at eluding anglers as well as nets. At first I spent countless hours casting flies in all kinds of weather without any success.
I had to forgive myself for trying so hard. Once you’ve seen a steelhead hooked, you’re desperate to hook one yourself. In those early days, I’d watched a guy play a good-sized fish below the dam in Healdsburg, where the old-timers set up lawn chairs to observe the action. I probably could’ve made a few bucks by selling popcorn and soft drinks. The fish put on a show worthy of their attention, executing three or four spectacular leaps before being brought slowly to net, ending a twenty-minute tug-of-war. That was the sort of thrill I craved, and I would mope around the trailer and moan about the time I’d wasted catching nothing except colds and fevers. But the hours weren’t really wasted. Without being conscious of it, I’d been getting a feel for the river that ultimately paid dividends.
I began keeping a fishing log to record my almost daily interaction with the Russian, an exercise that proved invaluable. I noted where and how I fished, the weather and the cloud cover, and so on. The log quickly taught me how important the color of the water was to anyone fishing flies. The optimum period was often two or three days after a rain, when the river was dropping and clearing and still carried a bit of silt. (A big storm, on the other hand, knocked the stream out of shape for much longer, a week or more in some cases.) The silt lowered the visibility, and that seemed to work to my advantage. The steelies would still take a fly if the river was gin-clear, but not quite so readily. They don’t feed while spawning, so hunger was never a motive for striking. But they will strike if a fly annoys them. They don’t like being distracted from their mission, I believe.
When the river was high and roily, there was no point in fishing at all. I was better off taking a nap. Even the bait casters had no luck unless they hit a steelie on the nose by chance. As I waded the river, I began to see how many feeder creeks emptied into it. Some were only five feet wide, but they still hosted a fair number of spawners, and it was always a good idea to cast around the mouths of those creeks. That was especially true in dry, low-water periods when the fish were waiting for a little rain to make the creeks navigable. I was surprised at how habitual the behavior of steelhead could be. They stacked up in the same holes year after year, following a map that must’ve been implanted in their genes at birth. I could count on those holes to deliver a fish just after dawn or just before sunset.
The river when flooded offered a different type of entertainment. I’d sit on the deck of the trailer and watch the debris float by, an astonishing array of flotsam riding along on the foamy tide. Hubcaps, uprooted trees, unmoored boats, farm implements, plastic jugs, sections of barn siding, it looked as if entire communities were being swept out to sea. Flooding brought new birds to the Russian, stragglers in the storm who’d lost their bearings — “accidentals” to use the birding term, such as the black-crowned night heron I once saw standing in the shallows and twitching its head around as if trying to determine how in the world it came to be in Alexander Valley.
The first two winters were tough. I struggled and lost as many steelhead as I landed, maybe five the first year and eight the second. But even in my third year, when I felt I knew the ropes, I still found steelies much harder to catch than any rainbow or brown, although my tally did finally reach double digits. Straight through until spring the fishing kept me occupied, and I’d only quit after the last run of bluebacks in March. They were small fish fresh from the ocean, dappled with sea lice and particularly bright in color. Maacama Creek nearby was so clear by then I watched them ascend it, the hens swirling around the gravel to make their redds, while the bucks hovered ready to fertilize the eggs with their milt.
The heat in the valley came on strong in April, and the Russian lost some of allure. As the flow decreased, the insect life flourished, willows budded, and the fruit trees on the property, relics of an orchard from before the era of wine grapes, were in blossom. One morning I walked along the river and saw a flurry of surface activity, little swirls and dimples. The smallmouths were waking up after their lazy winter in the deep pools. I retrieved a lightweight trout rod from a garden shed and grabbed a few popping bugs from my fly box. It won’t be an exaggeration if I say I caught a bass almost every cast. Pound for pound, smallmouths rank near the top for their ability to fight. They liked to dive down when hooked and stayed down with remarkable determination, and they were adept, too, at tangling my line in a low-hanging branch and breaking off.
As the summer grew even warmer, the smallmouths became listless, and their frenzied activity ceased. They could still be caught in July, though not so easily. The river was just a trickle in spots by then, murky with an odor of the swamps. I’d have no more fishing until the rains came in late autumn and the breeding cycle repeated itself again. I remember how impatient I’d get in early November, driving to Jenner to see if the sandbar was gone yet and cursing the seals who feasted on the steelhead trapped beyond it. Five years went by in that way, five years of fishing and learning. If it’s ever your good fortune to live in close intimacy with one river, you’ll carry it with you for the rest of your life.