December

Got a text from a certain someone yesterday about a fabulous day SRC fishing.


Off a beach




With a fly rod




Now who could that be?




c/22

Since I don't text and haven't done much beach fishing, it certainly wasn't me.

Pretty good day on the beach Saturday.
Ended up with over a dozen fish to hand, with seven 15" or better.
Missed a lot of fish as well. Big fish of the day taped out just over 20" at the tail fork.

Lots of color variations at this time of year from bright silver to golden hues. Many of the fish look like they have another two to three months in the salt before heading up the creeks. One of the fish looked like a rainbow. Hybrid perhaps?

All the fish were taken on a yellow Estaz belly sculpin.
A few pics from this weekend.
SF

Healthy looking fish.

Stonefish's excellent adventure. Those are some plus-plus fish.

That fly is a src harvester, great looking bug.


Congrats!

Nice looking cutthroat broodstock. Thumbs up!

All in context.

SRC - Sea Run Cutthroat (fishy in the salt and spawns in there rivers)

SRC - Snoopy Rod Classic (bunch of old boys fishing with short rods shooting potato at each other and just plain causing a ruckus on the OP, all for a good cause)

SRC - Serial Rate Converter (term used in electronics)

SRC - ... (come up with your own, I'm done)

And we all thought English was a difficult language to master.

ps: Those pictures of SF SRC were from the salt

Outstanding fish!

Stoner, found a twin to your salty hybrid. This one is off a Vancouver Island SRC blog.

Was reading up on his use of the Sage TCX 6119 switch in the salt & there it was.

Thoughts?

Thoughts?
Looks more like a steelhead, but beautiful salt fish regardless of what it is.
I'd of liked to shake hands with it.

A friend uses a 6119 switcher in the salt and loves it.
SF

SF so your thinking small steelhead? It sure looks just like your hybrid to my untrained eye...

A couple of pics from today.

Excellent!

Guess that's the consensus.

I like to think of sea run cuttthroat/ rainbow steelhead hybrids roaming the estuaries thou.

While steelhead/rainbows (Oncorhynchus mykiss) and coastal cutthroat (O. clarki clarki) can and do occasionally hybridize here, it is far less common here on the Pacific coast where the two species co-evolved (having diverged from a common ancestor a mere eight million years ago) than in the intermountain west where the rainbow is an introduced species and has, in many areas, swamped populations of the several cutthroat subspecies there. The principal mechanism of genetic separation here seems to be reproductive isolation; steelhead/rainbows preferring larger streams and rivers while the coastal cutthroat selects the smallest of tributary streams for its purposes.

"so your saying there is a chance"

No, I'm just saying that it does occur but that it is rather unusual. Pictures from the only such study that comes to mind (Forks Creek) would indicate that, rather than some sort of blend, the hybrid offspring usually have the general appearance of one or the other parents and would probably require genetic analysis to differentiate.

It was a joke Dr. Singletary

Worked on a number of OP streams that had CT and SH. As I recall, we had only one place where we found hybrids. They were in about 10m of creek downstream of a small falls. Pure Ct above, pure SH below. I don't think we did genetics on them but they characters of both.

Another time I saw a presentation on fish ID. The pictures looked like pure CT or pure SH; genetics showed exactly the opposite. I think WDFW found the same sort of thing in some Lake WA tribs about a decade ago.

Amazing what we find when we look really closely.

A show now on Kong channel 106 -Comcast "the Rocky Mountain Fly Highway "

Fyi