It is easy to get into a fly-fishing rut. Almost everyone has experienced times when they find themselves just mindlessly casting. The rhythm of the cast and the often beautiful surroundings act as a soporific. Before you know it, you have spent an hour or even a whole day in a seminumb state. This happens to me more often than I care to admit. But ruts can be much deeper and have far more profound consequences than just zoning out for an hour or two. If you aren’t careful and don’t take time to think outside the fly box, you can find yourself missing out on a lot of fishing.
Celibacy
I stopped fishing for local steelhead 20 years ago. While I love being on the Central Coast’s rivers and creeks, seeking out these astounding creatures, it is seldom a relaxing or solitary experience. At the merest rumor of fish, anyone with a “pole” is on the water, working a chunk of cured roe or a night crawler through the well-known holding spots. These guys are joined by lure fishers, who machine-gun their way through each pool before moving on at breakneck speed to the next spot. If you are determined to fish a section of river before the rest of the world, you need to get up long before the sky shows any hint of the sun’s return. Even then, you may well find you are not alone. Competition for bank space can be intense, and it is sadly not unusual to be given the evil eye as you walk along the river. If you do find an uninhabited section, you can be sure you’ll eventually have company, and that company will probably not look kindly on someone sweeping a fly through “their” water. In 1996, I had a demanding and often stressful job and quite frankly did not want to spend precious fishing time dealing with crowds. I decided it would be better for my mental health if I became a steelhead celibate. I put away my gear and moved on with my life.
Last year, though, my friend Jim retired and started bugging me about the local steelhead fishery. I made a few lame excuses, but he’s a really persistent fellow. Eventually, I relented, purchased a steelhead card, and we made plans to scout out places I had not seen in over 20 years. I was pretty sure I would not bother to fish, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to show him the water and enjoy a few hours walking along a river with a friend.
Not surprisingly, after two decades of winters, things weren’t exactly as I had left them. While most of the roadside access points were still easy to locate, the scenery was a lot less familiar when we got to the river. Reaches that had been relatively open in the Clinton years had transformed into a jungle of rod-grabbing willows and wader-snagging ground cover. Several massive downed redwoods, which back then had seemed so permanent, had moved a lot closer to the ocean, turning formerly productive pools and runs into sand-filled flat water. If I was going to be of any help to Jim, I needed to learn the water all over again. This turned out to be serendipitous.
Hidden Gems
As we blundered our way along the banks, it was apparent that the river was divided into two types of water. Approximately 20 percent was in so-called “holes” where everyone fished. The remaining 80 percent was composed of long, often heavily wooded sections, which appeared to be all but ignored by the crowds. I wondered if there might be some fish-holding water buried in the woodwork. While Jim made a valiant effort to find pools and riffles that weren’t already occupied, I went crashing into the riparian tangle. Progress was neither rapid nor easy, and it quickly became apparent why few folks bothered with these areas. Most of these side excursions proved fruitless, but a few led me to some gems.
Unlike the well-known pools, these “secret” spots were pockets of deeper water scoured out from behind boulders or downed trees. My guess is that few are permanent. Most are likely formed when flows and structure are suitable and become silted up or disappear completely within a year or two. A few provided
enough wadeable water to ensure that a hooked fish could, with some difficulty, be followed and landed. The best spots were big enough to hold a refrigerator or perhaps a Smart Car, and if I was lucky, a steelhead or two. Judging from the complete lack of boot prints, this was virgin water, an incredibly rare commodity in an urban fishery. If I could figure out how to get a fly into the water and fish it properly, I might be able to cover fish that hadn’t been mercilessly assaulted with gobs of roe. Therein lay the problem. Willows crowded in from the sides and in some sections arched completely over the water, forming a long, green tunnel. The river was seldom more than 20 feet wide and sometimes half that or less. To complicate things further, the best-looking water was frequently tucked under a curtain of willows sprouting from the opposite bank. I made a few attempts to get my fly into the water using a bow-and-arrow cast, but the results were far from satisfactory. My 9-foot fly rod was pretty much useless in these tight quarters. The Spey and switch rods that seem to have become de rigueur on some steelhead waters would have been a complete disaster.
I knew right then that I had to come back to solve the puzzle. Two decades of steelhead celibacy had just ended.
Channeling Lee Wulff
It was obvious I was going to need a much shorter rod if I was going to have any hope of finding these secret spots. And rod length wasn’t the only consideration. While it might be possible to land half-pounder steelhead on a 5-weight rod in relatively open water, the tight quarters I was considering and the chance of bigger fish demanded nothing less than a 7-weight. Fly-fishing pioneer Lee Wulff had championed the use of short rods for large fish many years back. In countless pictures, he is seen hefting a massive salmon in one hand and a rod 6 feet long or even shorter in the other.
These short fly rods were popular for a while, but for some reason they faded away. Take a look at fly rods in the glossy catalogs or on the Internet, and you will notice that most are between 8 and 9 feet long. You can find a few rods that are in the 7-foot to 7-1/2-foot range, but these tend to be limited to the lighter line weights. A catalog company is currently selling a fiberglass 7-foot 6-inch 7-weight that is purported to have a slow action and could be a good choice if you don’t need a really short stick. A few genuine Wulff rods as well as some shorter Silaflex and Cortland fiberglass rods are occasionally offered on eBay and at around $50 to $150 could be a real bargain.
But these aren’t your only options. The world is actually full of rods that are under 7 feet long and that have the backbone of a 7-weight. They are called spinning rods. I dug around in the garage and found a fast-action Berkeley 6-foot 6-inch spinning rod designed for chucking three-eighths-ounce lures. A few roll casts in the backyard showed that it was able to handle a 10-weight line.
Next stop, the river. With just two weeks left in the season, I didn’t have much time to waste.
The Punk Rod
There had been some unsubstantiated reports of one or two steelhead caught by guys fishing roe. With a total run that numbers around seven hundred fish in a good year, this isn’t a place where you expect reports of lots of fish anyway. The river was running at a manageable level, with a light-green tint — in other words, perfect steelhead water. Jim and I decided to try a section below a gorge, since that is where fresh-run fish would likely hold and wait for the next rain to provide passage to the spawning gravels.
Jim was keeping up appearances with his gadget-adorned vest (also a Lee Wulff invention) and 9-foot rod. I wasn’t. An old System 2 reel loaded with a fat, lime-green weight-forward 10-weight f loater was zip-tied to the butt of my gaudy spinning rod. To complete the ensemble, a gold-and-red Wobble f ly was loop-knotted to the end of a short leader and hooked onto the giant butt guide. To the untutored eye, the fly looked an awful lot like a Flatfish lure.
We passed some anglers on the way upstream. It was clear my setup was making an impression. No one said anything, but the expression on a couple of faces gave the game away. I hadn’t got looks like that since 1977, when I sported an orange spiky haircut and self-tailored second-hand clothes.
The punk rod worked surprisingly well. With a simple Perry Poke–style roll cast, I was able to get into all kinds of interesting spots without snagging the fly on willows that almost seemed to breathe down my neck. I even got a few grabs from some young steelhead/resident rainbows. We did not find any mature steelhead that day, but the punk rod beta test was a success.
The following day, a fresh series of El Niño rains began to unload their cargo, and we were out of commission again. While waiting for the rains to cease, I set about converting another old spinning rod into a short fly rod. The 6-1/2-foot Berkeley spinning rod was fine, but I figured a shorter, slower-action rod would be better. A trip to the attic revealed an old 6-foot Shakespeare fiberglass spinning rod I had picked up for five dollars at a flea market some years back. I stripped the guides and handle off the rod and replaced them with some single-foot snake guides, a plastic reel seat, and a simple cork grip.
The rains finally let up, and I got back on the water. I had swapped out the weight-forward 10-weight line for a floating Scandi head, which was better at roll-casting my flies into water that screamed “Fish!”
Sadly, there were none. The run had failed to materialize, most likely due to years of drought and ridiculously warm offshore waters that had hammered the ecosystem. Maybe things will be better next year. I plan to find out. In the meantime, there’s a bunch of tree-lined ponds and sloughs that I need to explore.
Searching for the Second-Hand
Garage sales and flea markets are excellent sources for old, soft-action glass spinning rods. Find one rated for quarter-ounce to half-ounce lures, and you are in business. If you don’t get self-conscious about having the right profile, just zip-tie a fly reel to the butt of the rod and go fishing. These rigs will easily roll cast to 20 feet and hit 40 feet with an overhead cast in the rare event you need to place your fly that far away. If you want to gussy things up or find the grip a bit uncomfortable, it’s not that hard to saw off the handle and seat and replace them with a normal flyrod grip and reel seat. YouTube has videos that can help. If this sounds like too much trouble, there are plenty of custom rod builders out there who can whip you up a great short rod for a fraction of the price of a normal rod.
I’m betting there are some interesting waters near your home that are buried inside a wall of vegetation or behind some other casting impediment. Occasionally visited by kids, but overlooked by “serious” fly fishers, these places have the potential to provide hours of entertainment and sometimes exceptional angling. They may not have steelhead or trout, but so what? Hook a carp or catfish, and I can guarantee you are going to have your hands plenty full. The cost of admission is usually zero dollars, and suitable gear is almost certainly on sale for just a few bucks at a nearby garage sale or flea market.
