We left very early Monday morning and made the 7+ hour drive west in separate cars. We arrived at Orleans Outdoors tackle shop at just past noon to secure our fishing licenses and get some up to the minute info on the fishing. We were pleased to hear that the water levels and fishing conditions had been improving of late with the King Salmon run coming to an abrupt end with more steelhead and browns beginning to show in increasing numbers. We left the shop and made our way a mile down the road to farmer Roy’s parking area along side the river access point and greeted Roy with a smile and handed him the outlandish $2.00/day parking fee! Now it was time to get suited up and make our way to the river where I could begin Brian’s intro to the many new skill sets he would need to become a successful fly angler for steelhead and browns on this river.

Our first afternoon on the river was spent checking out the various pools and allowing Brian some time to learn casting and the “high stick-dead drift technique” (getting the fly down deep with no line drag at the surface) necessary to get hook-ups. By late afternoon, we had made our way up to the top of the long Archer Pool where we would finish out the afternoon. Along the way we spoke with many other anglers to get the latest streamside info on what has been happening the past few days and pretty much heard the same report, which was; a few hook-ups per day could be expected with a mix of steelhead in the 6-9 pound range and browns running on average about 5 pounds. This was about what I expected for the first week of November. During the late afternoon, the Waterport Dam crew shut down the water flow to the river to remove leaf and other debris from power generating turbines. Once that was completed, the water gates were opened and a huge surge of water, silt and leaf debris flushed downriver creating impossible fishing conditions for an hour. The good thing about water flush is that the increased water flow would surely draw trout upstream from the slow running “frog” water that makes up most of the lower river. And sure enough, as the water level and clarity returned to normal, a few fish were hooked up. I had one decent sized brown hooked up but failed to get it to net, and Brian, at least, was getting some valuable practice in preparation for the next two days.

Tuesday, day 2, broke cloudy with air temps in the upper 30’s. We arrived at the parking area at 5:45 AM, finished up our coffee, suited up and made our way down the access path to streamside. We spent the first hour fishing the “Access Pool” hoping to get some trout transiting through to the upstream spawning beds. Neither of us got a single touch and I decided to head upstream to the Upper Archer Pool, another transit type pool that we had fished the previous late afternoon. However, the normally favored right side bank was well occupied with several anglers that we had met the day before, so we crossed the river and set up opposite from them on the lesser favored side. Our side was less favored because the current break and resulting seam were adjacent to a slight back eddy and therefore, fewer trout would transit nearer to us than would on the opposite side. In previous seasons I had done well here and was sure we would get a fair share of hook-ups. The fly choices for browns and steelhead are similar patterns and are for the most part, egg pattern imitations of various contrasting colors (since the river bottom was littered with salmon eggs) and stone fly nymph imitations in black and brown (normally found in streams). Both choices provided us with several hook-ups each throughout the day. Brian had a fair number of “takes” and a few fish hooked, however, he had some difficulty with the new gear and unfortunately was unable to get one to net. On the other hand, he learned a great deal with these “misses” and I was sure he would eventually put all the pieces together and land his first fly caught trout. I also had several takes and successfully landed a few trout including a large steelie that pushed 33 or 34 inches with a weight of about 13 pounds. All things considered we enjoyed a great day of fishing on the Oak and were looking forward to one more day.

The "favored side" with the Yankee Fans (note the well defined current break)