There are a lot of Oregon guys on here now. Let's give your brethern a little general steelhead fishing activity reports - not a zipperlip or your favorite hole; just some good genreal info about known rivers to help with decisions whether to go out into the east winds to get after some chrome, or go to work or stay home and score some points. ...

To that end:

The smaller north coast rivers became barely fishable around Thursday last week but still put out lots of steelhead catches - especially on the NF Nehalem R. That is a small 'zipper', not, that everyone happens to know about. But there are several other small streams in very NW Oregon that drop and clear quickly and most have good numbers of steelhead. Mark and I went Friday to try the NF Nehalem below the hatchery. For the first time in many years I fished in a crowd of bank anglers, about elbow to elbow. So many fish in there it was still easy to hook a few steelies in a short period of time. But that's all the amount of time I cared to fish in such a crowd (in every hole in the area we were told; and the parking areas were over-flowed). So we took off for another small but much less fished stream and got into a few more fish. Water condition was perfect. Really fun! I love fishing the small coastal rivers.

Over the weekend mid sized rivers such as the Wilson came into shape, and had good fishing also.

Inland, the big Clackamas R. is having another good run like last year's best one in a decade; and catches were good in recent days. I didn't hear about the Sandy R., but expect it was likely good there too.

We have a good brat run going on region wide, unlike last season. So let's hear about some of your Oregon river adventures on here too. Since there are fish everywhere it won't bring you much extra company. Thanks. The Washington guys are posting about coonin 'em all over the west side of the state.

As for X-mas vacation prospects they should be good most everywhere. But the real hot fishing may not last long; because of the vacation pressure and a forecasted long cold dry spell, with those damned east winds. How nice it would be to have the faucet set on a steady good flow, instead of on full blast for too long of time and then shut off for too long of time. Leaves a short window of hot fishing opportunity that many guys can't get out for. That's feeshin, as they say. Really shouldn't complain though with the excellant returns of fish this year, and to keep returning next year. Good luck.

Steve

[ 12-24-2001: Message edited by: RT ]