Right and Wrong

Fishing in general has a lot of mentalities, but fly fishing, by far, has the most facets.  To be honest I haven't spent enough time with gear fishermen to know their politics.  I have however, been around my fair share of fly fishermen.  I've worked in the fly fishing industry for 11 years including working in a fly shop.  I'm not saying that this makes me some omnipotent knowledge base about fly fishing or the people that do it, but I've gleaned an idea about the groups of fly fishermen.  There are some serious base groups; dry fly only, spey, nymph, super all the gear, billy down the street.  All of these groups come with heavy opinions of the other groups.  I'm not saying that if you prefer one of these methods that you necessarily fit directly into that group.  This actually adds more diversity to the amount of opinions that people have.  I am going to say that about 90% of all fly fishermen hate each other.  If they don't hate each other, they show disdain for particular practices.  I'm definitely not on the periphery of the disdain.  I can be a hater sometimes too.  For me it usually comes down to the ethical treatment of fish.  No matter how you catch the fish, it should be done in a way that won't harm the fish whether or not you intend to release it.  Alright, enough with the heavy.  I told you that story to tell you this story...Our goal ultimately is to catch all fish on a fly rod.  Sometimes we get a little dirty trying to figure out how.  This may be cause for reproach for some, but now that I'm warning you....you've been warned.  We fish some bait from time to time, we eat some fish (not a lot, yuck), and we'll throw anything you can put on a fly rod.  In the end, it's all about the fun for us.  A lot of people have opinions of right and wrong when fly fishing, but when it comes down to it, right and wrong is really about the treatment of the fish.  Basically, unless you see me spearfishing orcas, don't get your panties in a wad (as my mom would say).

First Attempt for Flounder

Alright, after three days of heavy rain that blew the rivers out and in general kept us inside, we had a one day window on Friday.  60 degrees on the central Oregon Coast with light winds at 8 mph and sunny and an incoming tide at 11:30 to 5:30 high/slack.  The rivers were still blown, but we wanted to do something weird anyway so we set out to fish some flounder on the incoming tide.  The dogs were ecstatic to be on the beach, and we were ecstatic to be the only ones on the beach aside from a few clammers.  We fished two different places.  The first place we caught right on the incoming tide, which didn’t really fish.  I’m not sure if this was due to operator error, or the fact that the tide screams in like the bore tide in Alaska.  I tried to get some video of the tide coming at us in small flash floods, but my electronics are in sad need of an upgrade.  I hope to get a SLR this summer to save everyone from my woefully inadequate photos.  Anyway, from what I’ve read, and what makes sense is that you need to strip a clouser along the bottom in short interrupted strips.  I’ve also read that you need to fish flounder (and most ocean fish) on the incoming to high slack tide.  I understand the theory, but it ended up being harder in practice than I had envisioned.  The tide screamed in making it virtually impossible to set the fly and then do a slow strip along the bottom. Also, I think that the 8 mph wind prediction was for a few miles inland because we were almost in chuck and duck mode.  We were happy to be outside and let the dogs run so we may have prolonged this fishery just a little bit.  I think it might be worth checking out at a higher to slack tide when the water starts to back feed and settles down a bit.  Theories...

The next place we went was a few miles down the road.  We thought we needed to race the tide and figured that this place would fill in faster than the first, but it ended up slowly filling throughout the day until around 5:30 when it slacked out.  As opposed to the beach conditions at the prior spot, this place had larger jetty type rocks that sloped into deep pools.  Beside the obvious difference in terrain, there was an abundance of sea life that the previous spot had lacked.  There were birds working the area, small bursts of bait fish on the surface, tiny white crab, barnacles, seaweed, etc.  It seemed a more promising place to support fish, but not exactly flounder habitat.  There were some more sandy flats that we did fish for flounder, but they did not have the steep sandy drop offs that flounder evidently like to hang out on.

This is the part that I love about the ocean.  We’re obviously not really going to catch our target species in here, but aren’t really sure what other kind of fish will be in the area.  We’re quite a way from the ocean in between complete sand flats on low tides.  A fish would really have to have a reason to come in so far, or come in on a very high tide and then become temporarily resident until the next high tide.  Again with the theories...

Still outfitted with chartreuse clousers,  we cast in and really weren’t sure what we’d catch, as this place supposedly had flounder, sea run cutthroat, silvers, and dungeness crab (marked off the list for now).  Long story short, I caught the first mystery fish!  It ended up being a small black sea bass and the first that I had caught on a fly rod.  Catching this fish on the second cast made it all the more exciting because there was now hope for the day that really started off with zero expectations.  We actually flogged the water for another two hours as the tide came in until I got my next hit, which I failed to connect.  We started trying different methods; adding more weight, changing fly color (but not getting outside of the clouser realm), slower and faster retrieves, jigging motion.  Finally T hooked another smaller bass with the jigging motion and heavy weight.

At about 3:30 we knew that we had another two hours of incoming tide until high slack, which we should be fishing, but the endless casting with only two fish to show after 3 hours in generally the same spot was starting to wear on us.  We packed up the rods, hit the bathroom, turned around to leave and saw more bait fish exploding, more birds had moved in, and the rocks we had been standing on we covered by water.  The surrounding sand flats were also completely covered.  We literally turned our backs to the water for about ten minutes and everything had changed.  We parked back in the same spot, got the rods back out, cast for another hour, and didn’t hook anything, though it looked like we should have.  Again, we decided to pack it in.  I made one last cast in a different spot near the truck and hooked my second bass for the day just as my husband had his rod stowed, so we fished a little longer after that.  All together three separate decisions to leave lead to catching fish.  Funny how that works.

When we got home we were pretty excited to tie some new clousers in different variations.  I’ll have to report back with the effectiveness of the new clousers and a different tide.  All in all it was an awesome day for not knowing what to expect.  The flounder are still out there though.