We headed out the next morning to a more remote location in the Olympic National Forest for another shot at coastal cutthroat trout. It was pretty cool to experience an early morning walk through a foggy temperate forest as we made our way upstream to where we wanted to start fishing. The stream was small, not as tight as the one from the day prior, but it still had that North Georgia feel to it. I hate to keep making comparisons of the Olympic peninsula to the southern Appalachians, but there were a lot of similarities to me – at least in the part of the peninsula we had been fishing. Both probably receive a similar amount of annual rainfall.
Throwing a trude style dry fly I was able to pick up a few small trout pretty early on. Much like yesterday, my first couple of fish didn’t really look that different from a lot of wild rainbows I’ve caught in the past. The one you see above was my third and it had a distinctive orange slash under it’s throat – this one I knew was a coastal cutthroat.
The creek we were on was full of timber – which is awesome for native trout. I’ve actually worked on some aerial photography projects for work in the last few years where folks are assessing the amount of timber they have in their rivers from the imagery we are providing them. It was pretty cool to see that in action – albeit in a different watershed entirely, but the same state at least.
The creek was a pretty cool, some spots were too narrow to really fish effectively due to the overgrowth, other spots were wider and we could fish those pretty well. There wasn’t a ton of room for a backcast on any stretch, but a backcast is generally unnecessary on small streams like this. The moss that covered everything was awesome – really gave it that Dagobah feel, lol. There are tons of interesting things you come across when you fish new environments – the little bubble ring that rotated in perpetuity was certainly one of them.
Coastal cutthroat were caught – mission accomplished – and the scenery was top notch. We were catching enough fish to keep us fishing, but I wouldn’t say the fishing was light’s out. Eventually we made it to a section of stream where the devil’s club kind of took over and was going to make wading through or walking around quite the adventure, so we opted to head back to the car and break for lunch. We had lunch at a cool little burger joint, Fat Smitty’s, in Discovery Bay – it may have been cash only – I don’t remember exactly, but the burger and shake hit the spot after a morning on the water.
After the burger I felt like we should probably give the sea-run version of coastal cutthroat a try, that’s one thing that makes coastal cutthroat so unique, their ability to occupy multiple habitat types, so we headed towards a beach access. Theoretically, this also put salmon in play for us – which was an exciting thought. This was actually a year where pink salmon were in Puget Sound and the Hood Canal, so there was an outside chance we run into one. Apparently they are only in every other year. I picked a beach where I knew the tide would be moving – it was more of a pass than open water. When we arrived the water was moving alright – it was probably moving a little too fast for us to fish it effectively. There was lots of debris being pulled through the area, especially sea grass, so it wasn’t the easiest place to fish. We gave it the ole college try though and thankfully I was able to avoid the skunk and caught a few a Pacific staghorn sculpin – at least that’s what I think they are, I could be wrong. No luck on the cutthroat or salmon front however.
No luck at this spot and no confidence that we even knew how to pick a good beach, so we called it a day and headed back to camp. I would be remiss if we had not given it a shot, but I also knew that PNW beach fishing wasn’t really what we went up there for. It was cool to give it a try though and I liked being able to make the comparison to the beach fishing we have on the Gulf coast for our version of sea trout. Just like the streams, different, but the same…..if that makes any sense.
Mountains to Marsh 