Metolius Shake Up

Holy crows, it's been ten days since my last post.  I blame this solely on the fact that we have not been doing anything fishing related, and it has definitely been wearing on us.  Three days ago, we found a boat while cruising craigslist (which is a terrible habit) and decided that we definitely didn't have enough boats.  Also, we had been wanting to get over to the Metolius to fish and realized that we hadn't been there in about four years.  Conveniently enough, the boat was located in Bend so we decided to take a road trip and add a third boat to our arsenal.  Check out "The Heat."  Tippy is going to have a run for her money, I can tell you that.

Now, The Heat may seem like your average Coleman Ram-X Scanoe, but he (yeah it's a he) came with a badass galvanized trailer, a 2 horse Honda, and the ability to go almost anywhere.  Estuary beware.  Anyway, we were very pleased to get the boat and can't wait to get it in the water to see what it's capable of.  On to the Metolius...

 We actually used to live in Camp Sherman and fished the Metolius quite a bit in 2004 and 2005 so this was maybe our second time fishing this river since then.  When we first came to the Metolius in 2004 we were young and eager and slept on the ground in our sleeping bags.  We ended up freezing our asses off and had to zip our dog into the sleeping bag because we almost froze him to death too.  We decided to commemorate the first ass freezing by camping out again at the Lower Bridge.  This time however, we slept in the 4runner with memory foam pads.  Things change.  We didn't end up getting the whole boat thing wrapped up until about 3 pm, then actually made it out to the river by 4 pm.  We did make one little stop by Pine Rest camp ground before we headed out to Lower Bridge, but didn't catch anything there.

At Lower Bridge we ended up doing about a mile round trip hike up the left bank, mostly looking for bull trout.  In the past we have seen a few trout in there and hooked a few, but it's mainly a bull trout show.  T did end up hooking one in the flat right above the bridge, but couldn't keep his hands on it for a picture.  We've kind of figured bull trout out in that they will either be super aggressive and take a four inch black leech on the swing (which you always try first), or they will hit a four inch flesh leech dead drifted under an indicator.  They weren't having the black but did end up hitting the flesh which T promptly lost on the mid-river stump.  The last one.  Of course.  

So, I wouldn't say that we were necessarily prepared for this trip.  We confirmed the boat deal at 9 am, packed up by 10 am and hit the road.  There was no fly prep.  The next day we walked down river from Wizard Falls with very little activity as far as trout, except in the Idiot Hole where T did hook a 4 inch fish that was promptly eaten off of his fly by a bull trout.  Very cool to see, but not exactly what we were going for.  We decided to call the trip around 1 pm so that we would be back to the coast by about 4 pm and potentially take The Heat out the next day.  We did make one more stop on the way out at Pine Rest where T caught a trout to round the whole trip out.  For a not so well thought out trip, it ended up being awesome just to get to the other side of the mountain and dry out for a couple days.