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It's been a long time since I've posted anything about fly fishing, but it's certainly not for lack of actual fishing. Part of our travels included a return to Vancouver in early September after our Alaska/Yukon trip. For two weeks, we based ourselves out of hometown Vancouver, making trips to visit family and friends in Winnipeg, Powell River and Seattle. I managed to squeeze in three great days of fly fishing during this time with each day taking on a different fish in different waters. Click below to "Read More"...
First off was a day exploring the waters around my parents' new place in Pender Harbour. I've driven through this area countless times (really) and have never checked out this small coastal region. One of its many attractions is a good number of stocked lakes. The local hatchery puts good numbers of catchable Coastal Cutthroat trout in most of the lakes. My dad has a new wrist-mounted fish finder that told us quite quickly that our first lake was too deep for fly work. We detected fish at about 90 feet... we had the sinking lines with us, but that's just not much fun. We packed up and raced over to another lake by the highway. A 20 foot approach from the car makes "Trout Lake" an easy adventure. At it's deepest, this small lake is only about 35 feet deep, so there was nowhere for the cutties to hide. They were quite eager to take Carey Special patterns at almost any depth, even sub-surface. Best results were definitely down lower in the 15-20 foot range. No pics, but 4 nice pan-sized cutts for dinner. Yum. Next stop was a trip to the Canadian side of the Skagit River in Manning Park with my brother Geoff. The Skagit is actually a very long river and mentioning the name in Canada or the States gets a different reaction. South of the border, the Skagit is a large dam-controlled river with significant salmon, steelhead and dolly fisheries. North of the border and above the dams south of Ross Lake, the Skagit is a smaller, very wade-able river with great native Rainbow and Dolly Varden fishing. This time of year is perfect for dry fly fishing on the Canadian Skagit, with both the Rainbows and Dollies taking swipes at Adams and Wulffs. We got into fish right away on dry flies with a nice 15 inch Dolly right at the first pool. Wandering down the river hitting various small riffles and pools got us a few strikes, but nothing landed. Eventually, we ended up at a pool I remembered from the year before. The riffles in front of the pool held nice rainbows that repeatedly hit our dry flies, with Geoff landing a nice 14+ inch rainbow that put on a good show. We saw some larger splashes below in the main pool and discovered at least a couple dozen very large dollies. We landed several, mostly on buggers swung across and deep. The largest fish broke off on my 6 lb test, but we landed one that was certainly a 5 lb specimen. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera again, so no pics of these fanatastic fish. A great day... can't wait for next year! 
My last day out on the water before leaving the continent was to tag along with Dickson Fishing Guides for one of their courses. Dennis and Mike were running their annual school on sea-run cutthroat ("SRC") on the Stilliguamish River in Washington State. and I managed to get into the last spot available, just two days before we would fly out to Australia. As always, the instruction and tips provided were invaluable in chasing these beautifully-coloured versions of the coastal cutthroat trout that I am familiar with from Canadian coastal lakes. We floated the lower section of the river unmolested as a closure on salmon retention meant all the meat anglers were sitting at home thinking that the fishing was "closed". All the better. The catch-and-release action for us in the school was very good and I managed to end the day with a large male SRC. Mike and Dennis got a few good pics and posted one on their weekly fishing report. 15 minutes of fame for me! Here are a couple of pics from the day kindly provided by Mike. I can't wait to hit this fishery again next year!
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