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Poppered Out, Part 2

3K views 6 replies 7 participants last post by  flytyer 
#1 ·
After being drubbed by two popperheads on my left and right while fishing for coho on the beach this morning at Golden Gardens, I looked for some redemption in the Snoqualmie. I stepped into the Powerline Hole at 4pm. Fifteen minutes later, in the bucket, I hooked a typical snaky Snoqualmie hatchery buck that had to weigh only five pounds. If only he had the girth proportional to his length, I thought. A fish is a fish but why was his nose was all scraped up? Was he sticking it into places he shouldn't be? There are a lot of salmon in the river, mmmm. I rested the water by taking a nap on the sunny rocks after admiring Juro's Caddis Creeper in the late afternoon sunshine. A testament to the effectiveness of his fly is that it worked in bright sunlight in one of the most popular runs on the river that I'm sure had been hammered all day.

I stepped back up to the head of the riffle and began lengthening out my casts as I worked the far side seam again. At just about the same place in the middle of the riffle, the swing stopped and came tight. This time, I was only able to elicit a couple head shakes and a short downstream run before getting disconnected. Oh well, two fish on a sunny afternoon ain't half bad. The smell of coho skunk had long since disappeared.

While I was fishing Powerline, I kept glancing upriver to Plum's and saw that it was being ignored, so I drove up to fish it. Plum's fishes exactly like Powerline except that it's only half as wide. I began at the top swinging the Creeper from the farside slack into the seam then down and out into the main riffle and on down into a hangdown. I hadn't stepped down very far when I got a good, solid pluck. It was in the hangdown – oh gawd, the dreaded hangdown, my nemesis. I stepped back out of the current a couple steps and made the exact same cast to the other side. This time as my fly swung into my nearside seam, I forced the swing by guiding the rod towards my bank. She was waiting for me. Ahh, sing Hardy sing! Bend and buck CND! Whoa, there goes the backing knot! Geez, there's a lotta line out there. Better get out and do a little walk downriver.

She was a handsome 8-9 pound hen in fine shape. Coho? What coho?

Leland.
 
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#6 ·
Folks, Leland is using his beach popper in the Snoqualmie and getting torpedoed by surface-angry summer runs. Code name for the popper when in freshwater is "creeper".
Sounds like disinformation to me. I noticed this "steelhead" report was in the Pacific Salmon in the Salt section.:hehe:

Seriously, Leland it sounds like you had a great day. Way cool!
 
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