Yakima River Report - Get the Biscuit at the Bottom

Today I was off the clock working on my spey cast down here in the Canyon and was recognized by a Red’s customer I have worked with in the shop.  He invited me to hop into his raft for a float and I couldn’t resist.  We floated from from MM20 to Umptanum.  The water clarity was reasonably clear, as can be expected with a bit of runoff starting to happen.   There was snow in the forecast as well as a little of the w"-word, but you can only catch fish... if you fish.  We committed to the 4 mile float and didn't sweat the details.

We rigged up with a quinessential Pats stone trailed at least a foot by a Brown/Red San Juan Power Worm on one line and a hot head worm on the other.  With the water having a bit of color in it we decided to go wormin'.  We set our indicators (New Zeland set up) about 4 feet deep.  Reed and I both had a few hook ups and brought in a few fish on the left side of the river at the first holding lie just below the launch so we were off to a good start.  That is a really nice piece of slow water and the fish seemed to be stacked in there as well as the next hole below it.  We worked over this short section of river for a good couple hours and really took our time. 

We continued down river and just after MM19 on river right we had a few more hook ups including what seemed to be a real hog, which Reed unfortunately lost after playing the fish for a while.  This fish was very hard to turn over and had no desire to come to the surface.  Just getting its head up was impossible!  

Continuing down river the bite seemed to slow down, as did we since the and ice in our eyelets started getting to us.  Reed brought in one Whitefish just at the start of Frustration Flat at which point we pushed through that section of river.  Its frustrating haha.  We tried the last small section before the take out with no luck.  The bite was definitely better on the front half of the day.  

The day overall was a lot of fun, especially for me having expected to only wade fish for a couple hours and a friendly angler invited me aboard.  We did well on a variety of small olive and brown Pat's Stoneflies and Jimmy Legs, and got most of our fish on a Pink San Juan Worm. 

We found yesterday that the fish are most likely to take the flies if they are close or even on the bottom.  You can run into snags but you have to risk it to get the biscuit.  It was all in all a real awesome winter fishing trip.  It should get better and better with the warm forecast coming up.