Jay Peck's Blog

Water flows are still holding at 350 CFS. Plus now we do have some runoff to enhance the water release flows. However I do suspect a water flow increase this coming week, do to rain fall.

Time is moving fast. We are well into the month of October. Finally a lot is starting to change with the fishing.  The biggest change this past week has been with rainfall. We have received enough rain to refill the reservoir and caused some runoff. The runoff the in the lower river was very dirty at one point. In fact the water looked like spring runoff in Western New York, muddy brown. Water conditions like this on the Salmon River is very rare. The day that we had the dirty runoff there was enough runoff to trigger a large run of salmon that lasted for two days. The run was big enough to shut down the steelhead fishing while the salmon made their way through.

The steelhead fishing was back on track as soon as the big salmon push moved through. As I said before every fall is different. This year there is not a lot of salmon spawning in the river, especially the lower river. This has a big effect on the steelhead fishing. Normally we will have a big egg bite going on by now, all through the river. This fall we are still picking fish with egg patterns in the lower river. However the larger flies that we enjoy fishing on the swing have been more productive, at lest in the lower river. The upper river is where most of the spawning is happing, the egg bite is going on there.

Productive flies, for this week for steelheads has been Black stoneflies, orange, pink egg flies. we have been using size 8 and10 egg patterns. Also try fishing intruders and colors or combinations of Black, Purple, orange, hot pink. For the most part keep your flies about three to 3 ½ inches long. For salmon the standard Willy buggers in black and silver, brown and copper, olive. This week we did our best in lowlight fishing conditions with pink and purple estaz woolly buggers. The best size this week for Willy bugger fishing is a size 6.

Note;

I still have prime dates available, In mid October,21,22,24,25 for steelhead fishing on the Salmon River. I also have dates in November 20,21,22,23,24,26,28,29,30 available, this will be fishing for Lake run Brown Trout and steelhead. Anyone that has any questions, Feel free to give me a call at your convenience cell is 585-233-0436