I was fishing one of my secret spots this past week, from the bank, when a drift boat came sliding up, plugs out, ready to come through. Seeing me, they courteously pulled over to the other side, and dropped anchor to change gear for the tailout and to chat. "That's a nice slot," the guy said, "I'm surprised you didn't pull one out of there."

I was too. I was also a little surprised that this guy knew about my spot, as it's not much bigger than one bay in my garage, and I haven't seen anyone fish it, other than me, in over ten years. Since I have discovered the spot, I have gone out of my way to only fish it discreetly, usually on weekday mornings, and only after the drift boats are likely to have gone by.

I had expected to catch a fish out of the spot, because the day before I had caught one, and had released it back into the spot. Nice little hatchery hen.

We chatted some more, the guys in the boat and I, and I invited them to run the plugs through if they wanted. They declined, went down to the end of the hole, and had a takedown there. I think they had watched me beat the water to a froth, and decided that any fish that possibly remained was cowering in terror.

Then today <Brag Warning> I took my kids out to a local river, fished the Guardrail drift, and my five (six in 11 days) year old caught his first steelhead. One of the most popular drifts on the river, we had it to ourselves. At noon on Saturday. Go figure.

What I have decided, upon reflection, is that there are no secret spots any more, and that it doesn't matter. My secret spot isn't fished too much because it's tough to hike into and bank fish, and if you plug it, you'll lose gear every time. The easy spots have the crowds, when the crowds think the fishing is good, but if you keep something wet, you'll catch fish. On the aforementioned Guardrail hole, I catch fish after fish, regardless of whether I'm first boat through. I'd actually rather have some speedboat charlie go ripping through first to stir the fish up. He'll be so bent on getting to the next drift first, that he won't fish carefully and slowly, which is what gets me my fish.

In all my scouting in the Northwest, over the fishing part of my 40+ years, only once or twice have I come upon a really secret place, where I am confident that no other person has fished. One of those was a tributary of the upper Cowlitz, a little creek in a deep canyon, laced with vine maples and devils club. It took me 45 minutes to bushwhack maybe 200 yards down the hill side to the creek. When I got there, there was no trail, no footprints, no litter, no sign that this place had changed since the arrival of man. Most importantly, the creek was stuffed full of these beautiful little wild cutthroats that pounced on a #14 yellow humpy like it was a bottle of Colt 45 being rolled into a drunk tank. The grandaddy of them went 11 inches. It is still one of the best afternoon's fishing I have ever had.

Now, this spot is a secret spot, but I'll tell any of you how to get there, once you promise to me that you won't use bait, and won't keep the fish. Why? Well, two reasons. First, places like this need to be valued in order to be preserved, and that takes some amount of knowledge. Second, I doubt many of you would be ready to risk life and limb for 8 to 10 inch cutthroat. But I digress.

I worry that we are so focused on being competitive with each other that we risk making enemies of those that we need to keep as friends - each other. If we don't maintain a common attitude that this is a common resource that we are the guardians of, then the resource will continue to wither and die, and we'll be sitting around as codgers flapping our gums and telling our kids that you used to be able to just drive down to the river and catch fish.

I'm as bad as the next guy on this in some ways. God knows I play my cards close to the vest on some things. I know this lake... But I also have brought many people along, and taught them my rivers. Partly because they're friends, partly because I can model how to care for the resource, partly because they've got the disease like I do anyway, and they're going to be out there anyway. But mostly, because they're friends.

I think more importantly, I've started to learn about not stressing over the spot and whether someone else knows about it. I have my friend Long, "The Extractor", to thank for this. Long is so named because he has this unnatural ability to come along to a hole after we have fished it dry, or so we think, and then, reliably, to the point of being able to bet on it, being able to extract two more fish from it. Long has taught me that there is considerably more to fishing than getting to the right rock first.

So where does this all take us? Perhaps to the line that starts a Scott Peck book, "Life is hard." And we have to make what we can of it despite that. In the coming year, I'm going to try to be a model for a friendlier, more courteous user of the river. I have no illusions that all will adopt the model, but by god, I'm going to do my best to see that they're going to see what a good river citizen looks like. That's my committment to the resource.

But that doesn't mean I'm telling where my spot is.

http://www.steelheader.net/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=001136

Well said

Very well said, and right on the money!

Thumbs up!

Silver Hilton:

Very well said.....As a young teenager in the the middle 60's, my brother and I fished "Bear Creek" close to Redmond, while it was stocked with hatchery trout, we chose to fish....way up stream, away from the easy access area's. We would practice, catch and release, with small flies. These were the small, wild rainbows and some cutthoat.

I chose not to return to that area because of the "over developement" of that whole area, but like you have memories that will last my remaining years.

Thanks for refreshing those thoughts of the middle 50's........

"Worse day sport fishing, still better than the best day working"