Yesterday was a successful one presenting at the Fin & Fire Fly Shop. Instead of flying right fly home after the gig I scheduled three more days fishing with buddy Scott Robertson here in Bend, Oregon. Being its likely we’ll never match Friday’s bull trout fishing; we’ve changed gears and we’ll chase redband rainbows and mountain whitefish the remainder of our time.
This morning Scott led me on quite the hike. We scaled our way down into the upper Deschutes River canyon. I did a lot of these kinds of scrambles during my 34 years living in the Yellowstone area but the last one was in 2021. It felt really good to push the limit of my knees for a change at an elevation more than 700 feet above sea level!
The hike down took about 30 minutes. When you’re going down you try not to think too much about climbing out later. It actually wasn’t that hard today because the scenery was beautiful. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, the leaves were popping and there was hardly any wind. We couldn’t wait for first cast.
Scott suggested either Euro nymphing or dry dropper as today’s technique. Unless I’m competing in the World’s I’m unlikely to blind nymph fish much. I grabbed a fluffy size 10 Elk Hair Caddis and put a small nymph three feet below it and went dry dropper.
It was fun to be out there. Western trout fishing is much different than what I do now back in Wisconsin. The water is bigger and there’s plenty of room for casting. This is the kind of trout fishing I did much of my life. In the first hole I managed a pretty little mountain whitefish.
From there Scott and I leapfrogged each other heading upstream through some rapids and pools. We each picked up a few more whitefish but mostly little redband rainbows. A distinct characteristic of this subspecies of rainbow trout are the very vibrant par marks. They often keep these until they are adults which most rainbows don’t.
The rocks were slick as can be and my wading skills were a little out of practice. Scott has two knee replacements so we took a few breaks, something we didn’t get to do during our amazing bull trout sessions last week. Fin & Fire specializes in serving microbrews at their shop and as we left last night they gave us each one to enjoy while fishing. About noon we made these extra tall boys our lunch!
If you look close at the picture of Scott tipping back his beer, you can see a big stonefly on his collar. By mid afternoon we had a few salmon flies around. There were no shucks on the rocks so the jumbo fly hatch is just starting. The fish weren’t really on them yet, however we each caught a couple small rainbows on dries.
Scott and I fished until about 3 PM. We had Sunday dinner at his house this evening with his family so it was time to head home. A special thanks to Scott for bringing me to what happens to be one of his favorite places. It was truly a stellar day!
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