I drfited the Yuba last Friday, October 7, with Ryan J. and a friend of mind. There were quite a number of salmon in the river, especially in the Hammon/Sycamore stretch. Where there were salmon, there were lots of hungry, aggressive trout, and different from a lot of recent reports and my own recent experience, we caught many more larger fish than small. Peach and tangerine beads were the ticket. All in all, my buddy and I each had in the neighborhood of a couple dozen hook-ups, with the majority to the boat.
Saturday and Sunday were spent on the EC, plus a little time on some small water thrown in. My friend and I were downstream of Hangman's on Saturday, and we were only successful with hoppers and caddis on the surface. We caught several, but none of size. Sunday, we stayed upstream, and had a real good hour around 10 am, with about 10 hook-ups, including one pig. The rest of the day was tough, until about 4:00, when we fished one of my "secret spots" on nearby small water. We finished an hour later with about 10 apiece, all beautiful fish in the 10-14 zone. Then it was off to Snowshoe for burgers and IPA.
40 plus hookups with most landed is an awesome day on the Yuba!!! Hopefully the egg hatch is just a little late this year. I have only seen one or two salmon in areas that had 50-100 salmon last year.... On a positive note the Feather is completely full of salmon this year.
I did see October Caddis, but was unsuccessful with large orange caddis patters, both wet and dry. We had more luck with size 14 elk-hair tan caddis and size 14, 16 orange poopah.
Note that with the snow last week, water is now rising and there is some turbidity.
Good luck this coming weekend.
DJ
-- Edited by DJ Cal on Tuesday 11th of October 2011 05:46:01 AM
Just to clarify - we did not land "most" of our hook-ups; I don't want to claim greater success than we actually enjoyed, though we did do well. We landed the majority, i.e., more than 50%, but we managed to lose many also, either due to poor hook-sets, horsing the fish too hard, not stripping when we should, etc.; all the normal mistakes.
And yes, there were many salmon. I wouldn't claim intimate knowledge of the Yuba, but the part of the river I am most familiar with, the first mile or two below the bridge, did not have hardly any salmon, particularly where I remember them being last year. The salmon I saw were further downstream.
Thanks for the info. I wonder why the fish were hitting the small orange poopahs. Anyway, got them in my box along with a zillion EHC's.
Also, I don't consider "horsing the fish too hard" a mistake unless you are skating them across the surface right into the boat. IMO, a lot of people underplay their fish to exhaustion which if you are letting them go, is a huge mistake, particularly since the same people then hold the fish out of water for pics and the subsequent awards banquet.
