Steelheading and the art of when?

Fishing Guide Mark Bachmann captured this rendezvous on the Deschutes River. Bachmann with flyfishusa.com offers guide service on the river.

By Tom Peterson

Deschutes River, 2007 - The fly line shot from the tip of the rod as I jammed my thumb into the cork handle. The line slapped against the eddying water that bumped around the basalt boulders and shelves that lie underneath.

I lashed the river’s swirling sadness again and again with the line as the anger shot through my arm and the graphite rod, landing the fly line in straight beams that welted the water.

The sun had come too early, ruining the fishing.

The maribou full sail fly was useless and dangling as it floated. Fish eyes thwarted by Sol. So I raged on, calling it practice, slamming the line relentlessly, watching as the line died too early in the air, leaving a coil at the end where it should have laid out straight.

For an hour I flailed mercilessly, ignoring the pain in my right shoulder. Line straightened by the current, pulling up five loops of fly line, dropping the tip of the rod to an inch above the water, pulling up on the rod with my right hand, pulling down with my left hand on the line like I was a starting a Briggs & Stratton. 

I  sent that chartreuse son-of-a -!@#$% flying past my head and whipping over onto the water.

I gave in to exhaustion, frustration.

For almost as many times as I had split these waters with unsteady feet, I had come away with more angst and bitterness than when I had started.

Steelhead are hard to catch.

The dream could not be grasped again as an exhausted punch landing on a foe. No fingers in gill, no dance in camp, no stringer off my float tube.

And the great fish never sleeps.

It pounded through the current in my mind. Where its tail of hope had brought me into the day, its absence brought on self-loathing and hatred like scotch thistle and Himalayan blackberry after a fire.

I was 38, and the Gods of the Deschutes were laughing.

I was willing to do anything to bring their favor. I started the season with delusions of fish-filled coolers, long fights on my Fleuger medalist and unabashed tales of fish carnage.

You see, the first question asked on this part of the river, most rivers, if you have rod in hand is, ‘how you doin’ ?’

And it’s no inquiry into your well being, rather an inquest into the river’s generosity.

“Pretty slow. Got into one yesterday, but today’s pretty slow,” was an average answer.

Mine, however, was, “Haven’t touched one all year. This is my 8th float trip down, and I have not seen a fish rise within 100 feet of my fly.” 

“Wow, really?” was the response. It was like polio. Not that fisherman took a step back from me; they were all equally bitten with negativity about the river’s heart. It was rare to hear someone satisfied with the day’s catch.

But they wanted nothing to do with the negative vibe that I was bumping down the river.  

I felt like the Redsox pre-2004. 

Sometimes, it all works out. Sometimes it takes four months. Photo courtesy of Time Water Outfitters

The great drought was upon me, and I was contemplating the consumption of my own urine to somehow come through it.

I was willing to sacrifice portions of my body for a barely-legal hatchery catch. 

I shared my misery wholeheartedly with those who would ask.

I toiled through July and August, throwing curly leaders, covering miles of riffs and boiling sunken boulders. 

My line remained limp.

I went overtime, left my wife and kids behind in the pursuit. When the stench of my failure became too pungent, vaunted fishermen Corona Ron even took pity on me.

The 57-year-old grease-trap technician from the Bay Area with a penchant for Cerveza, jet boating, and tagging out 60 fish a year offered me a ride to the infamous Wagonblast stretch of the river.

The runs on both sides were hallowed for their ability to hold spent fish that had just punched through the largest rapid, Colorado, in the lower section.

I met Corona and legend Tom Reilly at the boat ramp at 5 a.m. Both had been fishing the river for decades, knew every rock, could find any fish.

We screamed up the river at dawn, just enough light to see the rocks that could send us hurling out of the v-hull if not skirted properly.

The boat hammered through Colorado, and we landed in the coveted water on the east side above Kaseburg Rock.

As I put my rig together, anxious to beat interlopers from grabbing the good water, an eye popped out of  my ancient rod. Corona and Tom shook their heads. There was no excuse for poor equipment. And mine was the poorest.

Ron lent me his rod, pointed out where the fish held and shouted direction. A maximum of two casts, straight line and leader, 90 degrees out, and right-hand fingers laced with the line to set the hook - but not right away. “You have to have balls of steel. When you feel the tug - give it a second or two before you set the hook.” 

If I waded too far out or in, he let me know with a scream.

His direction was terse and pointed. Mistakes were pointed out with gusto. He trained me for 5 minutes and left on his own quest.

It was deep wading, but I muddled through, precariously stepping down the run. Casting, taking a step, casting. Doing as Corona had taught me. Six to noon. 

The only thing any of us hooked was the roast-beef sandwiches I brought.

By 11 a.m., Corona was so disgusted with the day’s take, he yearned to be free of me. The albatross had to be buried, properly. He took me back to the boat landing. I was no longer welcome. Plus, I had to go to work.

“I got to get you out of the boat. You got some bad somethin’,” he said. “I never go a day without a fish.”

After the drop-off, Corona and Reilly ran back upriver and had several hookups, so I heard later that day in camp.

I hit riverbed bottom, hooked into a crag of basalt, drowning in the flush of fish I could never touch. Even Corona and Reilly couldn’t help me. I contemplated taking up spinners, plugs, maybe sinking a tuna ball below Sherars Falls.

The curse was unnatural; I put in my time; I was convinced those stingy Gods of The Deschutes had a personal vendetta. 

Or… maybe, it was me.

Literally me. I convinced myself it was my actual body odor, so specific. That was it. This stench of me was grossing out these finicky fish who have incredible detection of scent.

I was appalling. 

There is no end a boy will go to when consumed. I was on fire. I knew the score, and if it was my stench that was holding me back, then it was the stench I had to attack.

Lemon Joy is fairly inexpensive. 

A bottle at $2.13 will go a long way.

And on the night of Sept. 26, 2007, I took it to its sudsy limit. I filled a five-gallon bucket with water squeezed in copious amounts of the yellow syrup and mixed my concoction with a shot of Henry Weinhard’s Blue Boar Ale and went to work.

I stripped all the line off my reel and sponged every inch of it with the salve. I washed every fly. My fly box. My toenail clippers. My float tube. My plyers. File. My reel. My Rod. Waders, boots.

I took off my yellow rubber dish gloves and went to bed.

At 4:30 a.m. I jumped in the shower with my lovely Lemon Joy. And I began scrubbing. Scrubbing with my wife’s loofa.  Scrubbed till my skin was red. I scoured my feet, legs, face, ears, nose, hair – everything.

By 5:30, I was hiking up the trail to Rock Pile past the Cable Hole.

Smitten - My first steelhead on a fly summer 1992 while working for Oregon State Parks. Who caught who?

This wasn’t the first time. For those sadist fish had planted their demon seed in my youth, offering up a silver sided steelhead to me in 1992.

I was fishing up to my waist in a pair of cutoffs and sneakers and swinging a Shakespear rod of fiberglass when those bastards born of ancient aquifer and columnar basalt impaled their will on a pink bit of feather and string tied and glued to a 6 hook.

The gorgeous incarnation danced its tail on the water as it shivered with reflected light, and splashed in the rushing froth. I horsed it, yanked it, pulled it, and the water dancer wrapped in mirrors still gave of itself. The ultimate sacrifice it was, even adipose clipped and ready for beating. 

A keeper! 

Blood on the measuring tape, my friend, did not come without a price. It was merely a fish but it’s sacrifice was grossly amiable.

A life for a life. The strings were forever attached to this marionette. A tool forever I would be. Seeking the great fish. 

I gave it up like smoking. For 12 years I staved off, leaving the flow to start and raise a family.

Three newspapers a wife and two daughters later, I returned.

But even then I had tied my horse to an anchor and tried to plow an ocean.

A recent hiking trip a mile up the west side of the Deschutes brought back a little tale of a tail. The rock in the river behind Peggy and I once served as a respite in the great summer-long steelhead drought of 2007.

So now at 38, I found myself on a break... on this path alone before the dawn of day.

An improved clinch knot held the purple muddler on my new rod, and I was free of my scent. 

I was reborn and fresh with hope, and I entered the water. 

My feet went through the holes in the crotch of the float tube, and the water greeted me with the river’s force. I stumbled, learning to walk, as I made my way off the bank. 

The seam - the line between swift and slow water- was reachable. My best cast could land the fly in the swift and then swing into the frog water where lazy fish lie.

I sent the line as light broke over the east ridge. Good casts put the fly right into the swift water where it would quickly carry the fly downriver as I gave it a pop sporadically with a flick of my wrist.

I took another step, but the water was climbing on my waders as I moved. The deeper I got the more the river pushed me. I could see the large rock above the water below me.

I lost my footing and I cursed the river as it swept me down as I fumbled to regain traction on the slick algae-covered rock.

Turning and dragging my feet, I managed to stick a foot on a rock and stopped the float. I was down 30 feet from my start and missed a whole stretch of river.

The basalt stone stuck above the river, and I moved to the downriver side of it, and hunkered into the slack water that clung to its back. 

The river could not push me there.

With set feet, I ripped that chord and shot a line at noon just two feet into the swift water. 

It floated for a foot.

I gave the fly a pop.

It went another foot. 

And in a splash, a great fish fully revealed itself to me. The rod went limp. Time stopped.

The steelhead hung in the air above the rifles, above my brain and into the subconscious world of dreams and the mystery of my longing soul.

And then it plunged back to the water, headed upriver and spun my reel screaming.

Rod Up. Hook Set.

And it came again, fully out of the water, head shaking.

The rod snapped back and forth with the fish’s every movement. It twitched and wrenched at the line seeking escape.

In its submersion, it ran again another ten feet upriver. Then it turned into the current and swam right at me. I reeled in the slack as fast as I could. I stepped backward toward the shore. 

Back and forth, it went. 

The fish hammered at the leader and went behind rocks that were surely starting to fray the line.

Taking slack and creating drag, I stepped backward, backward.

I was floating above myself looking at the struggle. The flexed arm and the fleeing fish attached by a single line, attached to life and death.

And the moment when one would have the fortune or misfortune.

The fish, two years gone in the salt of the Pacific exhausted itself - against the current and my intention.

And it then lay before me on the grass of the bank. Adipose clipped. A great gift of The Gods of The Deschutes.

Millions of years of evolution and determination now spent at the end of my line and four months. And the adrenaline still coursed in my veins.

And a reckoning of my motivation. For sport, for accolades, for bragging rights, greed, I laid down its life. 

And I was no different.

But for the understanding of what had brought us together in the sweet vicious song of that river, bank and sky.

One giving its body for the other to struggle on.