Fly lines

I'm looking at my calendar. I don't have too many cash-paying trips left. The season is almost over - there's a possibility that my waders might actually get dry.

But, I won't count on it too strongly. The fishing is still awfully good.

Late fall and early winter have always been a special time of year for me. It's the guide's time of year, when I get to do a bit of my own personal fishing. Because of the deteriorating weather, most of the other anglers are gone. Nobody wants to chance booking a trip.

I go out with the idea that maybe today will be good and maybe it won't. If it starts snowing I can just pack it up and go home. Without clients there is no fixed schedule: no requirement that says I have to catch fish, or that I have to stay out for a certain number of hours or days.

There are still a few steelhead left around on the Deschutes. It's a good opportunity for me to get out and flex that old spey rod one more time. I've got some new lines and some new casting techniques that I picked up over the course of the season. I want to test them a bit more while the ideas are still fresh in my mind. And I'm never averse to feeling that reassuring tug on the line one more time if I manage to get lucky and find a late fish.

So, my friends and I are likely to take one or two more long three or four-day trips before the end of December. Of course we go highly prepared. We take our winter sleeping bags, and we have a large hunting-camp tent that is big enough for us to move inside with a heater and all if the weather requires. It allows us to get out of the rain at the end of a day, dry some clothes and sit down to a hot meal.

After dinner, while listening to the rain on the tent roof, we will sit around in the lantern light and talk about the fishing season past.

We did well this year in spite of adversity. It was a tough season weather wise. We started with a wet cold spring. In May we were huddled in the same tent, with the same heater, listening to the rain. It looked for a bit as if the salmonfly hatch would never happen.

When the hatch did come, the weather had one last hoorah in store for us. That's when the spring floods in Prineville came. I was so glad I wasn't on the river for that event. The flow doubled overnight - the river came up almost four feet in just under 12 hours. It would have been pretty easy to get your camp flooded or to lose a boat that wasn't secured well. Several people sank drift boats trying to get out through the raging flood.

Surprisingly, the flood didn't affect the fishing all that much. If you could get to the water, the trout were active. We fished in flood stage well into July. In the end it was like any other trout season, with the fish biting well - except that you had to get creative as to where to fish. All the regular spots were just too deep and swift.

August was another tough month. An ongoing heat wave kept the steelhead out in the Columbia for a long time. Later, it caused a melt-down of the glaciers on Mount Hood and the whole lower river was silted out. The early steelhead season, August and September, was a bust. I could have counted all the fish we caught on one hand.

Thank goodness we could go back to catching a few trout; that was the only thing that saved the day.

We didn't have any really good steelhead fishing until the very end of September, but the last part of the year was good. October treated us well. Despite the fact that is was a steelhead run almost 25 percent down from other recent years, we managed to catch our share.

The fact that we have had such a short season is perhaps why I have such a strong hunger for a little late fishing. Anyway, that's where I am headed. It's time to make some casts for myself, to hang up the fly lines column for another season, and to put up the sign on my door, "closed for the season."