Jay Peck's Blog

It’s been a while since my last update. As you can imagine I’ve been on the water a lot lately. If you follow my blog, you know my statement that conditions can and do change quickly. True to form this is exactly what has happened. We have gone from low water drought conditions, to high water flood conditions. We’ve been begging for some rain and that’s exactly what we got. I often say be careful for what we ask for, we may just get it. When all this rain finally settles out, we are going to receive approximately 7 inches of rain. This is a lot of rainfall without being generated by a hurricane. As of now I am still fishing the Salmon River. We are making a shift from salmon fishing to steelhead fishing. We had a great salmon run hopefully this will continue on to the steelhead run. As for water flows, as you can imagine, water flow is up. Water flows went from the minimum flow of 185 CFS a present flow of 1800 CFS. This is not adding the heavy runoff. The run off was so heavy that Douglas salmon run closed operations down due to high water flows for Saturday October 22^nd, A rare event to say the least.  As for the fishing, the salmon run was very good run to say the least. We had fish trickling in almost daily, which made the fishing consistently good with just a little bit of effort. Over the last two days I’m seeing a sharp drop off the new salmon coming into the river and a slow but steady improvement in the steelhead fishing. Keep in mind we will still see a few new salmon trickling in periodically and of course there is salmon spawning all through the river as of now. At this stage of the game we will concentrating our efforts towards steelhead fishing. I would like to tell you the type of water and a few techniques we are using catch these steelhead, But the game has changed. One thing is for certain Standard flies will produce, egg patterns in colors of Orange, Chartreuse, and her Oregon cheese. Egg sucking leech, I like the Orange heads on this fly pattern.  For the high water break out all the fun stuff we like to swing. It will take a couple of days to figure out the new patterns with the steelhead fishing. Conditions can and do change quickly.