SOMES BAR – I have some first-hand info to share today. We sent seven boats out fishing over the last three days covering the Coon Creek to Stuarts Bar areas. In summary, we are seeing very few steelhead.
Here are our actual totals from the seven total boat days: we netted three adult steelhead and three half-pounders, and dozens of smolt were hooked. There were several half-pounder hits on the flies that did not lead to a netted fish.
My personal boat run today with two expert fly fishermen only produced one netted adult (about 4 or 5 pounds) and zero half-pounders. So, there just aren’t many steelhead in this stretch of the mid-Klamath.
However, the general river quality is fishable. Clarity varied over the last three days but averaged about 2–3 feet in depth. River temps are in the mid-60s, and the river is flowing at 1,600 cfs in Orleans. We continued to clean off moss globules from our flies after every other cast.
The typical number of smolt interacted with on each guide day totaled around a dozen to two dozen per boat. The large number of smolt interactions is encouraging as far as potential growth for the future steelhead population, but we are obviously hit hard by the current loss of the half-pounder population and the small numbers of adults.
We have more rain predicted at the end of this week and early next week, so we are hoping that there might be more pods of fish migrating upstream with increasingly cooler water temps.
It has been tiring to fish hard all day with only one or two fish hits, but that’s fishing — so on we go.
The Klamath and Trinity rivers are closed to all take of Chinook salmon this year due to the collapse of the system’s fall-run Chinook salmon populations.
- Doug Cole, Marble Mountain Ranch Fishing Lodge and Guide Service
