On another thread I mentioned that I had, long ago, interviewed Ira Yeager, one of Washington's true sportfishing pioneers. A couple of you asked me to find and post that article.

Here it is, typos annd all . This was a rough draft. I couldn't find the final and have no ambition to edit this. Sooo, warts and all . . .

Ira Yeager Sport Fishing Pioneer
By Dave Vedder

In 1904, when he was only four years old Ira Yeager ‘s family moved once again. Their travels took them from Illinois to Montana and finally to Bellingham Washington, always searching for steady work and a decent wage. In Bellingham opportunities seemed unlimited. Virgin forests carpeted the nearby hills, promising work for loggers in more than twenty nearby camps. Huge runs of salmon brought commercial fishermen and canneries that processed salmon by the millions on assembly lines that clattered day and night.

Ira’s dad liked to fish the local streams whenever he got a bit of time off. “My dad or grandad would take me out there once in a while to fish those little streams. They had some pretty nice trout in them, in those days. We had bamboo rods, about nine feet long with an inexpensive fly reel and inexpensive fly line. Later on we fished off the dock at Lake Whatcom for what they call silvers - kokanee you know.” Sometimes they would take the buggy as far as the Nooksack near Lyndon for cutthroat trout and dolly varden. In the fall all the small creeks were full of salmon. Ira and the other kids would stop on the way home from school to try to catch the spawning salmon.

At the tender age of eleven, Ira went to work at the Pacific American Fisheries mill on the south side of town. Twenty-four conveyor belts fed salmon to the mostly Chinese workforce, who gutted, cut and canned the fish as fast as their hands could fly. The plant often took in more fish than they could process. When the lines couldn’t keep up, the fish were barged out into the bay and dumped or the fish were sold to a fertilizer plant. By 1915 the runs were falling of and some of the processors closed.

When Ira was 18, the family opened a small furniture store. In 1922 Ira bought his first outboard motor, a twenty horse Evinrude, for a hundred and fifty dollars. That purchase established Ira as the first Evinrude dealer in Whatcom Country. Today Yeager’s is the oldest Evinrude dealer in America.

As a young man Ira fished steelhead in the Nooksack. He seldom had any trouble taking a three-fish limit. One April day Ira decided to try the Skagit. He went to Lyman and talked to the butcher who seemed to be the only guy around who fished for steelehad. He gave Ira a skein of fresh eggs and told him where to try. The next day Ira took his girlfriend Marie and her sister- in -law Margarite to small ferry that crossed the Skagit. From there they walked a half mile to the spot the butcher recommended. Ira rigged rods for the girls with single eggs to fish for trout. Ira hiked downstream a bit and tossed in a fresh egg cluster. ”That line didn’t get ten feet and it stopped. My old pole was sagging like a small alligator had ahold of it. I set the hook and it began jumping like hell. I landed an eighteen-pound hen that had two skeins of eggs that must have weighed two pounds. That was my first cast in the Skagit.” Meanwhile, the girls were hollering for Ira to bring the gaff. Steelhead were hitting trout gear and breaking off. By day’s end Ira had seven fish on the bank and released several more. He knew he had found steelehad heaven and wondered how good the fishing might be if he had a boat. He soon found out.

A few weeks later he and two friends launched a small skiff at Hamilton. The plan was to drift down to Lyman fishing all the good-looking water. Before Ira could row to the far side, his buddies both had fish on. Ira dropped the anchor and made a cast. Immediately he too had a steelhead. The action went on non stop for three hours until they had twenty-two steelhead in the bottom of the skiff. They never did move the boat. When they got back to Hamilton, a few locals saw all the fish and got excited. “Jesus the next thing you know everybody was grabbing a cane pole and headed to the Skagit, fishing for steelhead. That set it off. We were lucky to have those fish. It was the sport of kings you know”

For years Ira and a few friends were the only ones to fish steelhead in the Skagit. As word leaked to Seattle anglers Ira saw the opportunity to make a few dollars guiding while enjoying his trips on the river. By 1921 Ira was guiding on a regular basis.

The depression brought hard times to Bellingham and the Yeager store. Ira and Marie were now married. Marie worked at the shingle mill to bring in a bit of money, but things were tough. Eventually Ira had to close the store. Ira helped keep food on the table with his guiding income. “ I think I charged five dollars a person in those days. I could take three a day at five dollars apiece. My headquarters was at Sedro Wolley. I stayed at the hotel there. Sometimes I would do two or three trips a day. Generally speaking we never missed. The limit was three. If there was four guys in the boat that was twelve. Sometimes we had two on at once, jumping all over hell.
Once everybody had his three fish, then we let em go. That happened quite a bit. We never caught any real big steelhead - twenty-five pounds was about the biggest. We got a few twenty-four pounders, quite often we got a twenty-three.”

Ira had an acquaintance in Seattle by the name of Eddie Bauer who had a sporting goods store. Eddie helped Ira find customers. “Eddie got to be a pretty good fisherman. He was a novice. We taught him how to fish steelhead.”

Ira’s drift boat was the first to ever fish the Skagit. He used only oars for power and drifted from hole to hole, stopping to anchor only after he found a concentration of fish. He rigged an anchor on pulleys so he could drop it without moving for his rowing seat. “ Now days the guides run up and down the river. They drift through a hole, then do it again. That’s mechanical fishing. not angling.”

A year or so after he started guiding Ira was told he would need a license. It took awhile to find anyone who could issue a license. Finally the agent in Mount Vernon typed up a license, The license was number one. The first guides license issued in Washington.

”I f a young fellow as just starting out steelheading the best thing he could do was hire a good guide Then he would know just where to fish and how to fish steelhead. A lot of guys will go all winter without catching any. The guides know where the fish are. You gotta fish every day.”

As the years passed Ira’s fame spread. The rich and famous sought his services. He guided sports writer Royal Brohm, Chico Marx, President Roosevelt’s daughter and many of Seattle’s elite business men. “I think I guided half of Seattle over the years.”

In a few years two other guides began working the Skagit and before much longer there were forty guides working the water Ira had come to think of as his river. Not only did they compete for his fish they began cutting his price. By then his price was up to twenty dollars for the boat each day. The newcomers began charging fifteen. The growth in the guiding business coincided with rapid declines in the Skagit River steelhead runs. Ira quit guiding for steelhead.

Near the end of the Depression Ira started a store on State Street and opened a boat and motor store. He had kept the Evinrude dealership and was one of the first customers of a local boat builder named Reinell Boat works. Ira knew Reinell was nearly broke and hadn’t sold a boat in months so he made him an offer of $800 for two, new eighteen foot, clinker-built boats with a natural varnish finish. Ira was now in the boat and motor business.

In the summer months Ira guided salmon anglers at Point Lawrence on Orcas Island. “ I had a crude skiff with a 22 horse motor. I would launch at Gooseberry point and run across to Point Lawrence. In early summer we would fish for springs (chinook). We would use a herring jig to get enough bait for the day. We kept them alive in a tank I built in the boat.”

“ I used twelve pound test line, a long cane pole and a Winona single action reel. You had to play them real carefully. When someone hooked a big fish you had to reel in the other lines and sometimes we had to chase the fish all over hell. It cost us some hot fishing time. The bite usually kept up until dark when the phosphorous began to show. They wouldn’t bite after that.

We sometimes put down a commercial line for halibut. Usually we would get a dozen or so up to fifty pounds. If we wanted lingcod we would fish a herring down in the rocks. You could get all those you wanted. Mostly we threw them back. Sometimes we could sell them for a small price.”

In the early forties Ira guided President Roosevelt’s daughter - Anna Roosevelt- Boettiger. One day when fishing from the Boettiger boat, Ira was astounded to see they had a radio onboard. They stopped the boat and drifted as they listened to the President on the radio. That was the day he declared war on Germany. Apparently Anna knew the deceleration was coming, because she made it a point to listed on that day.

Salmon fishing was so good at Point Lawrence Ira seldom found the need to venture farther. In the first few months of summer limits of springs were easy to come by. Most fish were in the fifteen to thirty pound range, but a few bigger fish were taken each summer. Over the years Ira and his guests took several forty plus pound fish and two over fifty pounds. Quite an accomplishment using twelve pound test line and a single action reel, in strong currents.

By mid summer the fishing switched from springs to coho. Coho runs were so large that it was never any trouble taking a limit. The customers were always satisfied but Ira didn’t have his heart in it. To Ira the spring, or chinook salmon was the king of the salmon family. “ I’ ll take a spring salmon to any damn fish in the world. I don’t want to catch no leaping tarpon, or any thing like that. Spring salmon is the king of all fish - for fighting and for eating.”

Like any other fishing fanatic Ira went on fishing vacations whenever he got a few free days. One of his favorite destinations was Active Pass in British Columbia. “ There was nobody there except a Canadian fella in a little put-put. I asked where was a good place to fish and he said “Right here.” We started in and the water was absolutely solid with herring. And right underneath them was salmon like hell! No matter what you did you would hook one. We hooked about twenty-five that afternoon and we didn’t know beans about fishing.”

Ira remembers fishing at Active Pass with his grandson Ira John Urig. In a few hours they had eight springs in the boat - the daily limit. A friend came by and offered to take the catch to the beach so the two Iras could keep fishing. They gave the friend five fish. “ I shoulda given him all eight. As we fished in a big eddy I told Ira John to drop his herring down twenty turns. By the time you get it down twenty turns you’ll have a salmon chewing on it. We soon had eight fish in the boat again and had to go in. Later Ira John told me had got tired of catching them so he had only been dropping down ten turns. But he was hooking them just as fast.”

Eventually, Ira abandoned Active Pass. Too much ferry traffic and too many other boats worked the area to suit Ira. “The herring disappeared, so we had to take frozen herring, and the salmon didn’t like that. And the fish were half the size they used to be. Maybe I got too old.”

Ira found new fishing grounds at Egmont, near Powell River. He often fished there with a Canadian friend named Vic Faulkes. Vic first showed Ira the bounty of the area at a place called Skookumchuck Narrows, where tide rips kept the herring and salmon concentrated. “I had talked to Vic before about down below the Skookumchuck.” Vic said ‘ If you can get to the bottom , you’ve either got a salmon or a big lingcod’. Of course we didn’t want lingcod they don’t do a darn thing except chew your line off.”

Vic would anchor near the heavy current with three hundred feet of rope. He fished with a live herring and a three-ounce lead. He called his fishing method mooching. Ira wasn’t happy with anchoring. He finally convinced Vic to try trolling at an angle to the current with a cut plug herring. It worked like magic. In no time they had limits of eight big springs.

Soon all the anglers in the area were fishing Ira’s way. But it was still hard to get the bait to the bottom in the heavy currents. Ira decided to try a heavier rod that would handle a ten-ounce lead. “We dropped our lines out there and before we hit bottom both of us had a spring on. In two hours we had eight springs up to twenty-five pounds.”

Most rods in those days wouldn’t handle that much weight but Ira had bought a hundred and fifty long, heavy rod blanks for his store. In a mater of days Vic and all his friends were fishing with the ten ounce leads or with a Penn 49 reel and wire line. Ira still has a few rods rigged that was leaning in the corner of his kitchen.

“Now when I’ve got a good thing like those ten ounce leads I will keep it a secret for a while. But Vic couldn’t keep a good thing to himself. Anyway before long there was no more herring. Coho dropped off first. A few years later there were no more springs. Famous old fish camps up there are now abandoned and falling down.”
Old age and despair over the declining salmon runs finally forced Ira to give up his beloved fishing. Today Ira is 97 years old. He lives with his ???? in Bellingham. The family sports shop, now operated by Ira’s son-in-law, Frank, is still in business on State Street. Ira spends his day remembering the golden days sport fishing in the northwest. His sweet memories are marred by his concern over what we have done to our once thriving resource.

“Fifty or sixty years ago all rivers and streams that ran into the salt water were full of fish. Today there must be thirty of forty streams that don’t have any fish. Some are dammed, some are plugged by fallen trees. On the bay and right up to the mouth of the creeks commercial fishermen do intensive fishing with purse seines, which are great killers of everything. With the Bolt decision giving half of all salmon to 500 Indian fisherman and the other half to five thousand white commercial fishermen, there’s little left for the sports fisherman. When I started fishing the Skagit they were putting in Baker River Dam. That took 25 percent of all the steelhead from the Skagit. Then came big Diablo on the Skagit. They put a dam across the Cascade so that’s shot.

If you want to bring the fish back to something like they were in those early days, close all the rivers. . . . entirely to any type of commercia fishing. Close all commercial fishing for ten miles out from the river mouths from California to British Columbia. In a few years there would be so damn many salmon and steelehad going up the rivers they wouldn’t know what to do with them all.

Ira’s fishing days are over, but the memories still burn bright. If we had the vision of other cultures where the wisdom of our elders was cherished, Ira’s words would guide us to a day when the fishing would once again be as it was when he first explored our northwest rivers. What a wonderful tribute it would be to Ira Yeager if we could act before it’s too late to restore his cherished salmon and steelhead runs.


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Thanks Mr. Vedder, that was a very nice article....warts and all.

Excellent read!

I heard at one point there was a book about Ira Yeager. Do you happen to know the name and author of that book?

Thanks in advance.

Wow! Great read. The good old days for sure. Fishing up here is tough for the average angler now. The hardcore guy can go out and pull a steelhead from the Nooksack once in a while, but for the rest of us...not so much. I never knew Ira was such a pioneer. It's a shame he's not more recognized, even in the store that carries his name, the store that had to be sold after Frank Uhrig died.

Well, even though their prices aren't the lowest, and their selection is not the largest, and they're not even owned by a member of the Yeager family, I'm a sucker for nostalgia and Americana, even though I may not buy much, maybe a little bit of Ira's old mojo will rub off.

I believe that book was written by Ira himself

It is not still in the family??? For some reason I still thought it was.

Great story!

Plus it confirms my grandfather's telling of Bellingham Bay being full of dead fish dumped because of catches exceeding cannery production capacity coupled with a lack of refrigeration (circa 1910).

I am born and raised in Bellingham and have been trying to find that Ira Yeager book for about 10 years so good luck with that.

I hear the book and perhaps a lot of his stories from this article are hog wash and that his family is a bit embarrassed about it. It doesn't matter to me really but something to put it in perspective.

I grew up next to a old local who died at 106. He knew Ira well. The stories guys like these told were insane. Most of them quit sport fishing a long time ago. Way too much work now.

It's an awesome book if you can find it, especially if you are curious about the development of the Skagit River steelhead fishery...

Fish on...

Todd

If you got $61, it could be yours:

http://www.amazon.com/Recollections-Spor...0804&sr=8-2

I hear the book and perhaps a lot of his stories from this article are hog wash and that his family is a bit embarrassed about it. It doesn't matter to me really but something to put it in perspective.



I am VERY skeptical about that assertion. Ira had reams of photos to back up his stories, including one of a 35 lb steelhead. The interview was arranged by one of his family and they were there all during it.

He was not a politically correct man and he was quite opinionated, but I have absolutley no reason to doubt any of his stories. Get the book, read it, look at all the photos, then make you own conclusions. Remember Ira is not here to defend himself.

Well that's just your opinion!~

If only we could go back to a more terminal area fishery...

My wife worked at Yeager's in the mid '70's. We lived close by and I'd wander down to bs with Ira when I had a chance. He did have his own opinion about things and he was always straight forward about them. You never had any doubt where he stood on whatever subject he chose to discuss. Having spent alot of time as a kid with a story telling Grandpa, I got a big kick out of Ira and his stories.

Was a student at Western 1962-64. Cut a lot of classes to hunt and fish around Bellingham. Yeager's was a frequent stop. From the first time I shopped at Yeager's, I had my eye on one of their unfinished eight foot wooden prams. The price then was $39.95. Two years later, as I was leaving Western and Bellingham, I stopped in and purchased my first boat. The price had jumped to $44.95. Those were inflationary times!

Awesome Dave. Thanks very much for sharing that. Very cool bit of history.

Talk about different times. After having lived in Bham for over nine years, much of that time spent on the rivers and in the woods around those parts, I have a very hard time picturing the setting and abundance back then. Sad that those times are past.

Thank you Dave for capturing a chapter for our archives of northwest heritage. I have the STS with your article in it and have read it more than once. One of the things I remember without re-reading the type above was something about steelhead jumping all over hell. Loved that! Just wish we could have days like that again. We travel for these reasons but even standing on some of the famous runs of the Skagit, Tolt, Skykomish etc., I still get a nostalgic feeling of those who came before me and what it was like. This part of steelheading is personally special to me after all the hype and politics of our current fishing situation.

Well done

Great interview.

I have kinda followed a similar fishing progression. (although quite a few years later)

Started out as a young kid with my dad mooching for salmon off of Point Lawrence. For a long time never went any further then that

After that I started to explore Active Pass by mooching and jigging for salmon.

I have never fished Campbell River area but now venture to remote Central BC coast and Rivers Inlet in search of salmon.

It is harder and harder to find remote fishing areas away from crowds.

Passing along some info that was passed my way:

Originally Posted By: Backtrollin
Excellent read!

I heard at one point there was a book about Ira Yeager. Do you happen to know the name and author of that book?

Thanks in advance.

I believe that book was written by Ira himself

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> The information is false. I own the book, I am Ira Yeagers great grand daughter. The book was written by a family friend and was only give out to close friends of the family and when it was it was painstakingly edited by Ira yeager's daughter.


Originally Posted By: stickfisher

Well, even though their prices aren't the lowest, and their selection is not the largest, and they're not even owned by a member of the Yeager family,

It is not still in the family??? For some reason I still thought it was.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> The store is still in the family. Ira yeager's oldest daughter Marianne Yeager married Frank Uhrig. They took the store over tell Frank past away 2009. The store was then passed on to Marianne and Frank's two sons. who still are the current owners. All of Ira's Great Grandchildren have all been involved in the store in recent years. Also the family still owns the property. the WHOLE family from Ira yeagers children to great grandchildren