The Fall River

Before we head up north to work for the summer our family tend to come out of the woodwork realizing that this is their last chance to see us before we will be pretty much out of regular contact for four months.  Not saying it's a bad thing, it just keeps us incredibly busy.  Last week MIL and FIL wanted one more mini vacation hurrah, so we headed back over to Camp Sherman and stayed in a little A-frame for four days of fishing.  The first day we drove all the way over to the Fall River near Sunriver just outside of Bend.  The last time I had fished here was probably five to seven years ago.  We stopped into the Fly Fisher's Place in Sisters to say hi to some old friends on our way over, but didn't see them in the shop.  We did hear, however, that the Fall had a huge fish exodus.  For some reason they just weren't there in the numbers that they used to be.  They also mentioned that the river had recently been stocked and that there were plans to stock up to ten thousand fish there this year.  When I think of stocking I think of put-and-take lakes so the concept of stocking a river was strange to me.

We headed to the hatchery first.  It was kind of cold and blustery which is how I always remember it.  I may have never fished here in warm weather.  What I didn't remember and was pleased to see again were the heated bathrooms.  What a weird luxury to have in the middle of nowhere.  We walked down past the trophy pools (which I couldn't get a decent picture of) and stared at the bathtub fish for a bit before continuing down the very beaten trail and walking straight through peoples' back yards.  The water here is gin clear (there's still no better way to get around that cliche) so we had to play the spot and stalk game, which is T's favorite.  Walk a few paces.  Scan the water.  A few more paces.  Scan the water.  We had only walked about ten paces when T spotted the first fish.  A pretty decent sized fish that needed just the right drift, and ended up taking a green Stalcup's caddis emerger.  Indicators in the first part of this section were way too gaudy so we had to nymph old school and actually watch to see if the fish took the fly.  This is T's joint.  He digs seriously technical fishing and will go through his entire boat bag and all of his boxes to catch a fish that he can see feeding.  I don't actually have a picture of this fish because I got bored waiting for him to catch it and headed up river.  I will say that it is good to have a second in command when fishing for these fish.  A buddy on your left to yell at you to set when they see the fish eat and you don't.  We played the Fall this way the whole day.  It's not really a multi-person fishery anyway.  The fish here are quality in size but they are few and far between.  Really we didn't see any fish under twelve inches the entire day.  The next fish was just above the falls.  I had to stand far back so the fish wouldn't see me as it was super close to the bank.  I fished a callibaetis dry with a red and white zebra midge dropper.  I must have made a hundred casts to get the right drift and finally got the fish to eat.  Flick, flick, flick.....It was pretty cool though that I finally did everything right.  The Fall should be the place that every angler goes once they learn the basics.  This place will hone you into a fisherman or you're just not going to catch fish.  They hang in the hardest places to get a drift, under logs, but still in plain sight.  If there is any unnatural movement to your presentation you're SOL.

I think this ended up being the smallest fish of the day on the Fall, and I was really happy with it.  Beautiful, unmarred, all with vastly different spot variations.  The regulations for this river are pretty ambiguous as to whether or not retention is legal, but I feel if I ever saw someone keep a fish from here they would get a serious eye shaming and dog shit on their door handle.  Next we walked up to the place where all the toadies live.  I was pretty excited to see that they were still there in the same places.

MIL stood out here until her legs were numb from the forty-five degree water.  Again she had us coaching her from an elevated position and cast to the biggest fish I had seen in this section yet.  She ended up using a small pinch on indicator here as the wind was throwing a little chop on the water and there was no way we would be able to see the fish eat.  She never did get the big fish, because an assassin came from the logs and intercepted the drift.  It was still a good fifteen inch fish and was well deserved.  FIL waded in and threw a few more casts at the donkey fish, and actually hooked it for a brief moment, but couldn't keep the connection.  So, we all hooked up above the falls and landed three out of the four, never seeing the actual size of the big fish.  Still, so far this had been one of the most productive days collectively that we'd had on the Fall.  With the toady trout stuck, we didn't see any more fish and decided that since it was midday we should head up river to the campground.

When we walked above the bridge, it was kind of amazing how few trout were really here.  In the past this upper section of river had higher numbers of trout in smaller sizes.  When you stood on the bridge and looked down on both sides you could see five to ten trout feeding and tucking into the cut edges.  This day there were no fish visible from the bridge.  We walked up a bit to the spot in the picture and saw a huge trout with his big white mouth flapping open and closed, feeding actively.  We all took our shots at this fish, constantly changing the fly pattern.  It was a collective effort to watch if the fish had taken the fly.  Finally FIL got the right drift and got his trophy for the day.  We must have fished to that fish for almost two hours.

After everything that had gone by this aggressively feeding fish, it ended up taking a pickpocket nymph.  Our guess as we watched the fishes' behavior is that he had been specifically feeding on the emerging callibaetis and we simply could not replicate the right movement or drift.  The fish only ate after the hatch had ended and we figured he just became less choosey. Who knows, really.  Maybe our first five hundred drifts were just garbage.  It's always fun to try to put reason to things though.

It was about four o'clock when we finally hooked and landed the fish.  We walked up the river a ways just to know that we had, but we all knew we were pretty much done.  We had an hour drive back to Camp Sherman, we had all hooked and landed a fish on one of the clearest rivers in Oregon, and it was definitely time to get some Wendy's Jr. bacon cheeseburgers and drink some beers.  The Fall is not quite as I remembered it, but thankfully there are still some big fish in there.