Cold and Calm Puts Bulls to Sleep

Bend, Oregon buddy Scott Robertson and I go back a long way.  In recent years we’ve fished together for the USA Master Fly Fishing Team.  We had the fun of being on winning teams taking home the Bronze Medals in Portugal in 2017 and the Silver Medals in South Africa in 2019.  The last few years we’ve been fishing for fun together places like the Henry’s Fork and several times here in OR on Lake Billy Chinook.

It was a cold one today on Lake Billy Chinook but the wind forecast was for little to none.  My shoulder was feeling the full day of stripping streamers yesterday but the forecast for the rest of this week is terrible so we had to go.  We ran about an hour behind yesterday’s schedule but seeing the thermometer at 25° all morning will slow any fly fisher down!

Sad to say but fishing was painfully slow.  Scott and I hit many of our usual bull trout loaded haunts only to strip our flies endlessly without a strike or even a follow.  I started saving my shoulder and spectated for much of the mid-day portion of fishing.  Taking it easy isn’t the end of the world.  Sometimes when you fish hard you don’t look around enough.  I took this downtime and did just that.  This long and winding lake is stunning to look at.

Because of the calm conditions we kept plugging away.  The conditions allowed for us to try some new locations and finally we found a few fish.  But the spattering of bulls were all unusually small specimens.  At least the skunk was out of the boat!

There’s one spot we refer to as “Ole Reliable”.  We were hoping to avoid it today but at 5 PM, when we were actually considering calling it a day, we looked at each other and decided we had to have a look.  We figured if it was slow there then fishing was truly awful today and that we had a legitimate excuse for our micro catch.  But wouldn’t ya know, the fish were there and we knocked off a dozen in an hour.  We fished till nearly black dark until we were so frozen, we could hardly move a limb.

The dozen fish we picked up at the end of the day were also for the most part smaller than normal.  I’ve chased big fish all over and there’s no doubt that when they aren’t feeding there’s not much you can do.

Scott and I will take a few days off.  In fact, we won’t fish again till Sunday.  In the meantime, I’ll be preparing for a full day of presentations at the Fin & Fire Fly Shop held on Saturday.  I did this fun event last year and really look forward to doing it again.  If you live near come on by.  It’s free to the public.  I also have a few Cliff Fly Boxes to do up and mail off.  Funny how this work thing gets in the way sometimes!

Jeff Currier Global Fly Fishing