Report: Yuba River

I had an opportunity to sneak out for a day of fishing, so I decided to give the Yuba river another swing. After December 1st, the water above Highway 20 is open again, so I figured this would be my target.

I arrived a little late (the morning fog slowed my driving time.) I was finally fishing around 8:30am or so. I had walked to a point upriver where I had never been. Saw some riffles well past a rather long stretch of still water that went for many hundreds of yards. Since a cliff blocked my access on river left, I needed to cross. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a shallow enough spot, so I walked back downstream to the last decent looking fishy area.

Early morning; looking downriver.

I was swinging various wet flies. I had a two fly rig with a smallish winged wet in front and a soft hackle in back. The flies were rotated every so often and mixed in with some hair wing steelhead flies as well. As mentioned in another post, I've been tying a bunch of hair and feather wing flies. My most recent builds even included my first official entry (to be classified as a true spey fly, it must meet a few requirements that I hadn't yet done) into a spey fly. I'll post pictures of those soon.

By noon, I had gotten a few tugs, but nothing more. It was rather quiet. Typical Yuba fishing. The only thing I was getting, was a plethora of casting problems. I'm not sure what happened, but I regressed a little and my casting was sloppy and I had a hard time getting the distance normally accessible with my two handed rod.

I changed setups several times trying to guess where the fish were. Started with a 3.9 ips sinking poly leader, then went to a furled neutral leader, then finally settled on a intermediate sinking poly. I threw on a little split shot to sink my unweighted flies a little lower. This is something I had never done before while swinging. It worked out pretty well.

Around 2pm, I was downriver from where I started, but still well upstream of the 20 bridge. A size 10 bead head soft hackle in the rear and a size 14 winged wet upfront made up my rig. That bead head was giving me some depth, where I assumed the fish must be. My current target was the tail end of a small rapid section, and more specifically, the seam from fast water to slow. On one of my casts, when the swing crossed that seam, wham! The jolt was so sudden, it almost pulled the rod from my hand.

As quick as it came, it was over. The fish released himself and I never saw as much as a flash. I imagine he was pretty good in size. He hit me really hard. This is why I love swinging flies! Hard hits that can scare the crap out of you.

About ½ hour later I started swinging just below the surface while a hatch was going off. I caught and landed a few smaller fish in the 12-15 inch range. Towards 3:30pm I was swinging one of my new spey flies (pictures below), it was accompanied by a size 10 soft hackle. In the heart of the swing, I felt another huge jolt.

Immediately, the line started ripping across the current. The fish was probably 70 feet away from me and had covered at least that distance cross river in the blink of an eye. He stopped in an eddy and I gave a few cranks on the reel. That woke him up and he zinged down river and it stripped more line off. I had a player this time.

About 10 minutes later, I muscled a 24-26 inch beautiful missile shaped rainbow to my hand. He was hooked squarely in the side of the mouth. This is the one of the biggest fish I've ever caught on a fly rod. And he gave a real good fight. In fact, this was one of those time I actually needed to use two hands to keep him under control. even noticed that someone had stopped at the road above me and got out of their car to watch the battle. Luckily for them and more importantly for myself, I didn't disappoint and lose him.

The fish was lifted out of the water very gently and I quickly removed the hook. After putting him up against my rod for a measurement. He was lowered back in and I let him sit behind my leg for a few minutes while he was cradled with my left hand.

I was a little concerned because he showed no sign of trying to get away from me. I moved him a little bit out into the current to try to get some oxygen to him. But, I didn't want to lose my grip and have him belly up. After a few more moments he gracefully swam out of my hand and sought refuge in a stream depression about two feet below me. He stayed there for another few minutes before swimming off like nothing ever happened.

While there was still another 45 or so minutes of fishing to come, that would be my last catch of the day.