If there's still time, I'll give the "chum baby" flies I tied a try this week. It's hard to get my mind around trout fishing in the salt. I should have been doing that this past month while the rivers I had been looking forward to fishing were out of shape during most of the first month of my retirement. I had a brutal but otherwise good trip this past week. I've only done this previously in the late summer or early fall, but have wanted to hike up the Queets River trail and fish my way back during the late winter steelhead season. So I did. However, this past winter's floods have washed out the trail in at least three places, and in another a creek now flows down about 300 yards of the trail, making it necessary to do the hike in waders rather than hiking boots. I could mention here that any hike done in waders is twice as long as one wearing proper hiking footwear. Getting turned around or lost in alder swamps has now become a standard part of this adventure. Consequently the hike took me over an hour longer than it has in the past. Although I got home Friday evening, my toes and shoulders are still quite sore. Nonetheless, the weather and water and fishing conditions were as good as I've ever found them.

I was going to head to the Cowlitz this week and maybe try a combo of spring chinook fishing in the morning and steelheading in the afternoon, but TP raised the river back up from 6500 to 10,400 cfs, so that's out for me. The south sound SRC and rezzie coho option is looking good for this week. Well, I should probably check the tide conditions, something I'm not tuned into for this fishery yet.

Sg