Estuary Hike

So, after our enlightening excursion that produced a couple of black bass, we decided to go round two, but this time hike out to the mouth of the estuary and concentrate more on flats fishing for flounder.  We were definitely planning more of a fun  exploration day and didn’t have much hope that we were going to see any fish.  The first day that we fished here, we hit pretty close to perfect conditions as far as tide went.  This time, the tide was on it’s way out, and looking to get to low tide at around 3:45 pm.  We got to the rocky spot at around noon and decided to try for a few more rock bass while we waited for the tide to get out so that we could really see all of the channels of the estuary on a low tide.  Sadly, as we suspected, fishing was pretty terrible.  When you have no hope though, any fish is exciting.  We managed to get a couple of bull heads on chartreuse and white clousers.

When the tide was out far enough that we could walk the flats, we started what would become a three mile round trip hike through sand and mud.  We followed the little channels that were probably no more than 6 feet deep in the deepest pools.  In this spot when the tide goes out it REALLY goes.  We were having a hard time slowly swimming our flies across the bottom without just swinging through.  Our shoulders were actually sore the next day from repetitive casting and fighting the wind.  I did notice that there seemed to be an abundance of food in the estuary.  There were tons of broken cockle and razor clam shells, eel grass, and baby fish of some kind (which would scatter when we got within 5 feet of them), and most disturbingly, quite a few dead immature dungeness crab.  The strange thing about the crab was that they weren’t pecked to death from birds, nor did the birds care to touch them after they had died.  Just hollow full body shells that seemed like the insides mysteriously vanished from.  Maybe due to the Oregon dead zone? We did end up with a confirmed sighting of a flounder that was about 3 inches long, which T promptly spooked, making a photo impossible.  Just seeing one got us pretty excited though, that we may be able to fish them on an incoming tide at some point.  As it became clear that we were not really going to have productive fishing today, we cast less and walked a little faster cherry picking the deeper pieces of water.  When we got to the confluence, we put in a few casts just to say we had, and then walked back in a straighter line.  We did end up coming across a guy pumping sand shrimp and chatted with him a bit.  He mentioned in an ominous way that there used to be flounder in here, pointing to the area that had looked most promising to us.  He seemed a little stand offish (like maybe we were casing his shrimping grounds) so we left him be without asking what in the hell “used to be” entailed.  By the time we were back to the car it was 4:30 and the tide was just about to start moving in again.  We were toast though.  On that note, one more gratuitous picture of a bull head.