Brian Marz's Fly Fishing Oregon Blog: Owyhee River Fly Fishing

Monday, May 12, 2014

O-So-Good

This past weekend my wife Nikki and I took an adventure east for our first anniversary to fish a sweet tailwater fishery with numerous large fish that tend to act like they live in a spring creek. It was the perfect timing for the first heavy duty pale morning dun hatches with fish feeding greedily like they were kids eating candy with a craze. There were also sporadic caddis mixed in here and there with some good pulses of "hatch-a-tivity", and the fish would gorge on them for those moments. Fish were eating midges in the pond like pools, but there was no need to mess with that technical type of fishing compared to the action you could see and receive with the PMD's. Below is a little photo essay to see what we got to see and experience out there......

The view from where we decided to set up the camp, and the look of the weather when we arrived...

After we set up camp, a little "evening rise" was occurring with pale morning duns and caddis...

This one really filled the net up. It was actually longer than the net from tip of the handle.

The desert landscape was loaded with spring blooms all over.

Catching browns with my Superfine Touch & CFO Reel is too fun & way too classic!

The smaller fish like this are far and few, but they are very scrappy and are really pretty too.

You know you have good fishing when your net is filled like this many times during the day.

The CDC PMD Comparadun was by far the best "fish catching fly" of the day for us. Too many fish for this fly....

For many hours of the day we caught fish like this on dead drifted size 16 Pale Morning Duns.

Smiles result from gorgeous canyons surrounding you with fish rising to dry flies all around you, and you have tight lines.

A nice deep bodied brown trout that crushed a CDC PMD Comparadun.

A close up view of one of Nikki's slabola browns that I got to see slurp her little PMD dry fly

"The Camp"

Letting this girl get ready for her swim off after we were lucky enough to admire her.

The scenery is awesome in every direction you look....

The hardest fighting most athletic browns out there tend to the be the 15"-18"ers.

Browns are really cool where some of them have lots of spots, and some have few that are spaced apart.

We thought how this arch must have a name; yet how many people actually know of it.....?

Netting another fine fish!

What a fishery! To think that you catch lots of these in a given day on the water.....

Fish on! A little finesse with authority goes a long way.....

Nikki seemed to catch several of the biggest fish of the trip, and all on dry flies.

Streamers worked really well, and it was actually a change of pace from dry fly fishing.

This side channel had some really gorgeous cobbles lining it....

A rather sweet agate that was next to the obvious one that you can see in the picture above.

This same side channel had a little spot on the downstream end where I hooked and lost my largest brown.

The view every which way was really stunning....

Fishing the "evening rise" with a caddis hatch that was occurring in the riffle above....

This wall had a bunch of rock doves that would occasionally get charged by a golden eagle.

Wild roses were abound, and there was even a grove of them in a riparian area I walked through

We were really fortunate to experience lots of these gorgeous fish, and most caught on dry flies.

Before we headed back home, we had to say goodbye to our new friends we made camping.

We were sad to leave, but we will be back again....

Eventually we had to decide to head back home, but the drive home out of the canyon is stunning.

A classic Magritte sky and a road to the horizon......

A little white knuckling through the Cabbage Hill stretch of Highway 84.

Quite the scenery seeing the Cabbage Hill landscape all green with its spring dress on.

Luckily we had none of this to experience......

Lots of giant wind turbines on the ride to stare at.....

Monday, April 2, 2012

High Water Flows in Western Oregon - Fishing Retreat for Lots of Brown Trout

This past weekend, I was feeling "spur of the moment" after having to cancel several trout trips I had booked due to super high water conditions from the last storm. I asked Nikki if she would be into taking a drive east in search of dryness, sunshine, and low water. She was into the idea also, especially since we got back from Florida, the sun has been lacking and the rains have been overly plentiful. We both decided after we both got off of work, we would bolt out of town eastward to the Owyhee River. I had not fished it ever, nor had she, but I knew it has been fishing well from recent reports. Midges, blue winged olives, and skawala stones were all hatching, and the fishing was going to be better than sitting at home waiting for river levels to drop in the swollen west-side rivers.

We got to the river, and it was full of big brown trout. It was also full of anglers, but we were prepared for the traffic and "human hatch" we had been warned about. It is true too that Boise people are the the most plentiful angling force out there. It is about an hour from Boise, and really far from anywhere else that is a major metropolitan area; so it flocks the anglers from there more so than Oregonian. It seemed like there were angler/s in about every decent looking spot, but the weather was sunny and warm on the first day. The fishing was great, and we caught a lot of fish on a variety of fly fishing techniques.

The second day had cooler but sunny weather, and the "human hatch" was way mellower than on Saturday. The fish were more interested in subsurface offering as well, but we caught way more fish than we did on the first day. It was really fun out there fishing with my sweetheart, and I thoroughly enjoyed watching her yard in large brown trout. We caught fish on everything from skawala stone dry flies, midge dry flies, and the best fly was a weightless nymph called a bubble top fished from the surface film to a few inches under water. It was really neat to see how well we did fishing a pattern that was not on the surface, nor on the bottom, but right under the surface.

Below are a bunch of photos from our trip, and I hope you enjoy them.....