I Got Speyed, Redux

Lately I’ve had rod fever. This happens from time to time. I convince myself that there’s a hole in the universe that can only be filled by possession of. . . some rod, some rod that is newer and niftier and pretty as a happy child hunting Easter eggs on a bright spring morning and that will make me a better caster and a better catcher and a better husband and father and human being. Rod fever may happen to me more than most, but I doubt it. And it never quite works out the way I think. I’m always still just me.

Last year I got rod fever bad for Spey rods, which is a peculiar thing for a Houstonian since there’s no real Spey fishing for at least a thousand miles. Still. I bought a Spey rod, and in 2018 we fished four days for steelhead on the Deschutes River in Oregon. We swung flies with long 13-foot Spey rods, about four feet longer than normal rods, and tried to learn Spey casts, or at least enough to get through four days’ fishing.

To most fly fishers, Spey casting is exotic and mysterious. It’s not like the standard overhead cast. It’s done with two hands, not one. There is no backcast; the line never lays out behind the angler, instead there’s some flippy dippy stuff that eyesight and brain can’t quite follow. After a couple of incantations and some pyrotechnics the caster shoots the line forward, as much as twice the length of a normal cast. It is a lovely, magical thing to see, baffling and irresistible.

Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland, J. Cary, Detail from a new map of Scotland, from the latest authorities, 1801, London.

The River Spey is in northeast Scotland, and the long rods and the two-handed casts originated on Scottish Atlantic salmon rivers. Speyside single malt Scotch is also from the region of the River Spey, Glenfiddich and Macallan being the best known, so there are many good things from thereabouts. What could better define a day of manly sport than putting on a bit of tweed, spending a day casting a Spey rod, and following it all with a wee or not-so-wee dram of rich and smoky Speyside? What man or woman could want more?

The long rods have advantages. They don’t require a backcast, so you can stand by a bank in a river and cast without hanging up in the branches behind you. They cast far, so you can cover lots of ground on big water, and the rod length better manipulates the line once it’s on the water. After four days of fishing I could cast 50 or 60 feet with the spey rod, but I fished near a good caster, Louis Cahill of Gink and Gasoline. He consistently shot line twice the distance I could manage, and it was beautiful.

Spey rods have some disadvantages. They’re not particularly accurate, and casting that far usually isn’t necessary. They’re made to swing flies, and swinging flies, isn’t common. Swinging flies lets the line pull the fly down and across in an arc, with the angler as the pivot point. It’s an old method of fly fishing, arcane even, with plenty of modern arcana pitched in to make the whole business obscure and esoteric, but except in the Pacific Northwest and maybe Scotland swinging flies isn’t common. Instead we let flies drift naturally with the current, or retrieve streamers. We don’t let flies swing.

I hadn’t seriously touched my Spey rod since our trip to Oregon, but we need to catch a fish in Washington State, and the obvious play, the right color of fish, is Olympic Peninsula winter steelhead. Kris didn’t hesitate. “Of course,” she said. “Let’s go,” she said. “And bring along some whisky.” Ok, she didn’t say that last, and she didn’t spell whiskey like a Scot when she didn’t say it, but sometimes one needs to extrapolate.

So I emailed Jason Osborn at The Portland Fly Shop and asked Jason who we should fish with in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Jason said he was guiding in southern Washington, but that the Olympic Peninsula was a good idea. He said that for February we should check with Jack Mitchell’s The Evening Hatch.

But I also had rod fever, I wanted–no, I needed–another Spey rod, so I asked Jason to send along a 3-weight rod and a matching line because suddenly Spey fishing for trout is all the rage, and like I said, I had rod fever. This 3-weight business takes a bit of explanation. Fly rods are in weights, higher weight rods are used for bigger fish. If you want to catch a 200 pound marlin, a 14-weight would do the job. If you want to catch a bluegill, a 3-weight would be the very thing. For steelhead, the usual weight is somewhere around a 7- to 9-weight. A 3-weight is built for smaller fish.

Jason made a couple of suggestions and I took the cheapest, a Redington Hydrogen trout Spey made in China. I should say it wasn’t cheap, but for a Spey rod it was pretty reasonable. It’s a rather homely fella, with none of the design flourishes that would come with a high-dollar rod, but it’s well put together. It’s perfectly good to fool with in local waters.

And for most of what we catch in Texas rivers a 3 weight will work just fine. It would let us practice spey casts before our trip to Washington, and that’s all I really wanted. The rod came, and we drove three hours to New Braunfels to see if there were any trout yet in the Guadalupe. There weren’t, they won’t be stocked until Thanksgiving, and the flow in the river was ridiculously low, but I hadn’t forgotten everything I knew, the rod cast fine, and there were bluegill and bass. I caught a Guadalupe bass, the state fish of Texas, swinging a girdle bug. I also caught a tiny bluegill on a partridge and yellow. What sounds more manly than a partridge and yellow? Just forget that tiny bluegill part.

And then I went home and had a wee dram. Or two.

T.E. Pritt, Pritt’s Orange and Partridge, Plate 6 – Yorkshire Trout Flies, 1885, Goodall and Suddick, Leeds.

Washington

Not D.C., the other one. There’s a story about that. In 1858, when Congress separated the Washington Territory from Oregon, the locals wanted to name the new territory Columbia. Congress wanted more done to honor President Washington, and so now we have both a state and a district. Laudible, and he is certainly worthy of honor, but my guess is whoever chose Washington had never done a Google search.

If friendly and delightful sea otters hadn’t been trapped and clubbed into oblivion, Washington State might be Canadian. The British wanted the Canadian border south at Oregon, at the Columbia River. We wanted the border considerably north, at 54°40′ north, well into British Columbia. In his 1844 presidential campaign James K. Polk made 54-40 or Fight the Make America Great Again of its day. Along with beaver, sea otter fur was the economic pile driver of the Pacific Northwest, but without that economic spur the British weren’t going to fight over a bunch of trees, and Polk got distracted by the Mexican-American War. In 1846 both sides compromised on the 49th Parallel. Meanwhile the sea otter population has recovered to about 100,000 animals.

“Mike” Michael L. Baird, Sea otter mother with nursing pup, 2008, Creative Commons License, Wikimedia Commons.

Washington is our 13th largest state by population, with an estimated population of 7,535,591, not including sea otters. It is more diverse than predominately white Oregon, with Asians, 9.3%, the largest group after Anglos, 68%, and Hispanic whites, 10.9%. Blacks are 4.3%. Washington ranks 11th in household income. Its economy is driven by technology and engineering, trade with Asia, by my purchases at REI, and by all those lines at all those Starbucks. Big names, Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, and REI, are based in Seattle.

It is a liberal state, or at least a Democratic state. In 2016, Hillary Clinton received 54.3% of the vote. There are states where she did better, but there are states where she did much worse. Washington tends Democratic, but not overwhelmingly so. In the 2018 senate election, the Democratic incumbent, Maria Cantwell, received 58.4% of the vote, but the increased percentage over 2016 may only mean that Senator Cantwell was a popular incumbent.

In 2016, the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, got 5% of the Washington vote. Nationally he received only 3.8% of the vote. One suspects that in Washington there isn’t so much a deep well of Libertarian notions as there is a bunch of traditional Republicans who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for President Trump, nor Hillary. That 5% was likely driven as much by protest as conviction.

Ali Zifan, 2016 Washington election map, Wikipedia.

Rural areas voted for President Trump, urban areas, the area around Puget Sound and the southern Portland suburbs at Vancouver, voted for Clinton. Only one rural western county, Whitman County, voted Democratic. Pullman, its largest city, is a university town, home of Washington State. It’s also directly across the border from Moscow, Idaho, an outlier Democratic area in Idaho’s 2016 election and home of the University of Idaho. Like begets like.

The other rural area to vote Democratic, that dark blue bar on the left that bisects the Olympic Peninsula, roughly corresponds to Olympic National Park. Not many votes, but I figure the rangers knew on which side their bread was buttered.

User:Symi81, Annual Precipitation of Washington State 1961-1990, 2007, public domain, Wikipedia.

Geographically Washington divides into six regions, and the regions correspond to (1) annual precipitation (no surprise there) and (2) voting patterns (I guess there should be no surprise either). With one exception it’s also the geography of our Northwest Coast, not confined peculiarly to Washington State, but running south to Northern California and north all the way to Alaska. It just goes to show how arbitrary our borders can be.

In the far west is the Coast Range, which, not surprisingly, is along the Pacific coast. Who knew? It’s a relatively temperate zone, with rare snowfall but plenty of rain. East of the Coast Range are the Puget Sound Lowlands, the Cascade Range, the arid Columbia Plateau, and in the far northeast a tiny sliver of the Rockies.

The exception, the peculiar feature and the area where we’re scheduled to fish for winter steelhead in February, is the temperate rain forest in the upper left on the Olympic Peninsula. It’s annual temperatures in low elevations occasionally dip to freezing, but are generally mild, if someone from Houston could ever consider 40 degrees mild. What it does have is rain. Constant rain. A drip drip drip of up to 140 inches in the lowlands during the winter season, while at elevation there may be up to 35 feet of snow.

R. Hoffman, National Park Service, Olympic National Park Annual Rainfall.

One of my doctors went to the University of Washington for medical school, across Puget Sound from the Peninsula. He tells me that it is so spooky and dense that it’s no wonder all those teen vampire movies are filmed there. I came home after we talked and watched the first Twilight, and while I wouldn’t recommend the movie, the landscape may be the best character.

Meanwhile we’ll be fishing for winter steelhead in and around Olympic National Park, fishing with extra-long two-handed Spey rods with Jack Mitchell’s The Evening Hatch, swinging flies out and across big rivers. I understand that temperatures will be cold, but likely not freezing. It will be wet. Winter is the rainier season, and the rainfall is measured in 10s of inches only after you clear the first 100. The fish are theoretically bigger than the summer steelhead we fished for last year in Oregon. Summer steelhead might be six pounds, winter up to 20, but the winter steelhead are even harder to catch. The winter fish are sexually mature when they come into the rivers and focused on the spawn and less likely to take a fly. They are the totem fish of the strange cult of Northwest Pacific steelheading. Maybe Kris and I have joined the cult. Kris didn’t hesitate when I asked if she wanted to try it.

So we will go to Seattle, maybe take a day or so to look around, maybe even cross to Victoria so Kris can finally say she’s been to Canada, but mostly we’ll stand around in a river in the rain and dodge the vampires while the steelhead dodge us. There’s always next winter.

Michael Gäbler, Hoh Rain Forest, Olympic National Park, 1992, Creative Commons License, Wikimedia Commons.