Trip Overview

I spent the week of May 24-30 in Hood River with my friend Mitchell, primarily to enjoy the strong and consistent wind for wingfoiling. Since Hood River is only 10 hours away from the Bay, I decided to drive. Both on the way up, and on the way back, I took the drive easy and drove over 2 days, so that I could stop to fish at some spots along the way. It was totally worth it, since I got to fish big and small water, and add some new catches to my list.

Fishing

Upper Sacramento

The Upper Sacramento is a river that I am more familiar with, and actually is one of the rivers that I first caught a fish on with my 10’ 3wt. To take a break from driving, I stopped at the swimming hole at Delta/Vollmers, right off of exit 707 on I-5. This stop requires you to drive down into the small community of Delta, and then cross the Union Pacific tracks to get down to this swimming hole area. The swimming hole area was busy with people this time, but previously near sunset, I have had good success with catching spotted bass on a wooley bugger there. I waded a little bit upstream of that big hole. The water was not super deep, right around upper thigh at the deepest, with flow pretty low as well. I tried to fish across the whole straight stretch of the river, but only gave myself an hour there before continuing on driving. I didn’t end up catching anything, but the water looked promising. I was only nymphing because it was hot out.

McCloud

My next stop after the Upper Sac was to stay the night at Skunk Hollow on the McCloud. My goal for the McCloud was to catch a McCloud redband trout, which is a species endemic to only this watershed. It is part of the California Heritage Trout Challenge, so I wanted to mark it off for that purpose. At Skunk Hollow there is a dispersed campsite, which is where I stayed the night, and it also provides easy access to the river. Here, I probably spent around 2 and a half hours fishing, which I waded upriver most of the time, and then fished my way back down. Within the first 5 minutes here I had my redband, right at the easiest access. I could sightfish right there because of how clear and shallow the water is. The redband there are very small. At the end of the day, there was a small caddis hatch, and the fish were feeding off of the surface pretty persistently, which allowed me to catch a few more redband and brown trout off of dry flies, which was very fun.

The next morning, I went to another hole on the river, that I knew to be really consistent small fishing, with many brook trout. This spot is downstream of a really big pool under the closed bridge, in which you can see some trout hanging out at the bottom. It’s fun to dangle your nymphs off of the bridge and handline catch them from there. If you go just downstream of the pool, there’s a small riffle, and in the tail end of that riffle, there are many many smaller brook trout. In the 45 minutes I was there, I probably caught 15 fish just in that section alone. None of them are that big, but it’s fun nonetheless.

Next, I went in search of bigger fish. I stopped at the McCloud swimming hole, which didn’t yield any catch, but did look promising if there was a hatch happening, since it had a good stretch of flat water with cover and deep pools for trout to hide. Maybe for next time!

Finally, I settled on trying below the Upper and Middle falls, where the have stocked trout. I parked at the Middle Falls lot, and then walked down. It was still early in the morning, so nobody was out yet, and I could see trout hanging out in between the boulders. This was very productive as well, and I probably caught another 7 fish here. If I remember correctly, they were all rainbow trout. Next, I went down to the lower falls parking, where I saw many spin fishermen casting into the falls pool. Instead of joining them (I have no idea how I would have tried anyways), I walked downriver a little, and found an area where I could walk down to the river from the trail.

This spot was also pretty productive, so I was pleased with how it turned out. There was a good amount of structure and typical deep riffles, which were great for my euro rig to get down into the strike zone.

Overall, the McCloud was a big success, and I was proud to catch my redband to fill out another trout of the challenge.

White Salmon

While we were in Hood River, most of the time spent was on the water (foiling) not fishing. I did see a large fish, which I think was a large carp, jump pretty close to me when I was out on the water, and some of my friends saw sturgeon jumping as well. We went out to fish one day on the White Salmon river (which was right next to where we were staying) but did not have any luck with the fish here. The water of this river was very very clear, deep, and fast, which made getting flies down into the water very difficult. Mitchell saw some fish from the surface, and I had a bite on one of the few good drifts, but otherwise we did not see many signs of life. After, when we went to Big Y, they let us know that the White Salmon wasn’t really fishing that well at the time.

Deschutes

Finally, on my way home, I decided to get 2 days of fishing in Oregon. I was able to fish in a few different places, the first being on the Deschutes near Maupin, then by Big River Campground, and finally by Wickiup Resevoir.

Maupin

In the town of Maupin, there is a river access road that extends quite far along the Deschutes, which provides many different spots to stop and fish from. It was great to be able to drive down the road and scope out different areas to fish from. I ended up stopping at these two areas, not far down the road:

Both of these places were quite productive, with a large whitefish and good sized rainbows there. I was euro nymphing most of the time, since some of the water was pretty deep. The fly shop mentioned that there had been good salmonfly hatches around the time I was there, but in the single evening that I was there, I did not see much bug activity, and only 2 rises until dusk. I’d definitely fish here again, especially since there are so many pullouts and opportunities along the access road.

Big River Campground

On my way back down, I stopped near Sunriver to sleep, and then the next morning, I looked close by for any spots to fish. I found that there was a campground, called Big River campground, that was on the Deschutes. This area was a little more difficult to fish, since the river had a lot of silt at this location which made wading hard. I also did not see much good structure, nor any fish in the water. I think I was probably there a little too early in the day, and since it was around freezing, there weren’t many bugs out to trigger fish to feed.

Wickiup Resevoir Tailwaters

My next stop was to Wickiup resevoir, which is also on the Deschutes, and provides classical tailwaters fishing. When I got there, there were two fly fishermen already at the best spot, so I worked my way downstream from them for a while, until they left. I wasn’t able to get very many good drifts through downstream, even though it seemed pretty fishy. However, once I got to the spot where the falls from the dam intersect with the main branch, I was able to catch some whitefish and rainbow trout. These fish looked healthy, and were hungry to eat what I was drifting with my euro rig. Following the foam at this spot was definitely a good way to be productive.

Spring Creek and Williamson

My final stop of this trip was by the Collier State Park Day Use Area, which has the confluence of Spring Creek and the Williamson River. Spring Creek has pretty interesting geology, where the creek itself is super deep with deep pools, but has fast-flowing water on top of it. Additionally, the water of this creek is crystal clear, which makes it easy to see fish, but also easy to spook. I didn’t see any fish while I was there, but even if I did see some at the bottom of those pools, I doubt that I would have been able to get down to them with the flies that I had. Next, I walked across the peninsula to the entrance of the Williamson, which provided nice knee-to-thigh high wading in crystal clear water. I attempted to swing some elk hair caddis flies through the entire flow, but didn’t get any signs of life in the 30 minutes I gave myself at that stop. Either way, it was very beautiful, and I would come back to this river even if I didn’t want to catch fish, since the water and environment was so nice.

Learnings

If I had to take one thing away from this trip, I would probably go back to “move more”. It’s easy to get stuck in one spot fishing, especially if there are some signs of life, but if that spot is difficult to get the right presentation, then it’ll be almost impossible to catch any meaningful amount of fish. So, just move! Go to the next stop. There’ll be fish there too.