I just finished reading Russell Chatham’s great book, The Angler’s Coast, essays written between 1968-1975 about coastal fly fishing in Northern California and Southern Oregon.
Chatham explores coastal rivers, estuaries and bays, fly fishing for the Pacific Northwest’s disappearing anadromous fish. In the introduction to the second edition, Chatham writes “If these stories were originally written as documents of things ongoing, they now record conditions only vaguely remembered. Wild steelhead and salmon are hovering on the brink of extinction.”
That depressing intro was written nearly twenty years ago. While you can bet ocean conditions, dams, logging and overharvest have continued to contribute to the decline of the Pacific Northwest’s fisheries, I’d like to hope we’ve gotten smarter since then, that it hasn’t all gone to hell. Some of our watersheds on the Oregon coast are bouncing back, and you can still find excellent coastal cutthroat, chinook and steelhead fishing if you put the time in and know where to look.
Chatham’s essays are full of world record fly-rod stripers, twenty Chinook salmon on twenty casts on the Chetco River. But the essays are also about fishing the urban-industrial edges, places where nature dies hard and giant, elusive fish eke out an existence.
“The Valhallas are not where they’re supposed to be, at the end of expensive floatplane rides, splitting the fare with an orthodontist and his credit cards, or a feedlot owner and two chorus girls,” writes Thomas McGuane in the prologue. “The magic zone keeps turning out to be a rectangle of light made by a highway bridge lamp where stripers crack into the holding bait.”
While the North Umpqua, McKenzie or Deschutes are all storied, scenic rivers, worthy of homewater status and pilgrimage, this book should inspire you to push the boundaries of your fishing experience, to look for places less-fished, to look for dark shapes sliding into coastal streams on an incoming tide.
You can pick this book up at the Eugene Library. -MS
I am for the most part a catch and release fly-fisherman and looking forward to expanding my fly-fishing for chinook salmon. I am also looking forwarding to reading THE ANGLER’S COAST . I am always looking for ways to expand and to broaden my horizons.
Noel Murphy.