FishwithJD

The web's best fishing magazine

When the real Adventure lies in simply getting to the fishing spot: A Tribute to the Journey

By Leave a Comment

Driftboat

So often we talk and write about the destination…but frequently the journey to the fishing grounds is the true story. Don’t believe me? Well, then just think for a moment on all the stuff you’ve done in your life to get to the fish: Some of it was probably not exactly what you’d call safe. Some was physically grueling and some of it was straight up fun.

This is a tribute to the journey: To all the rapids run and river crossings that were just at the top of your waders. To the miles hiked and rough water poundings. To the brilliant sunsets, calm waters and the epic adventures that make this sport so awesome. This is a tribute to Getting There.

morning glass
Is there anything better than blazing across glassy water at dawn? The anticipation of what the day holds is almost too much to stand, so you slam the throttle all the way open so you can get there just a bit faster. Unfortunately, these beautiful quiet moments are usually forgotten as soon as you get to where you are going and the lines are in…well, until the next morning anyway.

Floating
Perhaps more than any other method of transportation, small inflatables enhance “the journey is the adventure” concept. Man, some of the things we’ve done in these things would give the manufactures’ legal teams nightmares if they only knew. But what fun! And in some spots, personal rafts and pontoons are the only way to get there.

chainsaw
Alaskan backcountry jet boating in a little jonboat that could run on a wet lawn is one of my favorite things to do on this planet. Arm yourself with couple rods, a shotgun, a shovel and a chainsaw and go find the source of some creek. The “getting there” part is guaranteed to be more fun than the actual fishing!

ride home
Sometimes getting back is all you can think about. Maybe the dreaded north wind blew 35 freezing knots all day, the fish didn’t bite and now you have to beat your way right into the teeth of it to get home. It’s funny how it always seems that, after one of those long, cold, wet rides home you pull into the harbor and the wind lies
down and you think “well, that wasn’t so bad.” And that’s exactly how you end up back out on the water the very next day.

Bear
It’s something most sane people wouldn’t understand…but the allure of catching chrome far outweighs the risk of encountering something that’s higher up the food chain. Never mind that steaming pile of droppings in the middle of the path and the still flopping salmon missing its belly on the bank…there probably aren’t any grizzlies around here…right? Here, the journey involves some edgy nerves and, often, a heavily pounding heart.

waders
We all have those “I’m lucky I made it through that” moments and several of mine had to do with crossing raging rivers in chest waders and praying my next step out in the middle of the channel actually hits tierra firma before I fill up and get sucked down the deadly rapids below. And then there were those brutal hikes through the snow with felt soles…if you’ve done it you know what I’m talking about! Hiking and waders isn’t a great combination…but it usually means I’m headed somewhere cool.

raft
I’ve been on some float trips in which the portages outnumbered the fish. It’s funny how those trips seem so brutal when you’re there…but often become the most fondly remembered adventures after some time passes and the memory of the pain fades… “There we were, dragging the boat around anything Mother Nature threw at us…we couldn’t be stopped.”

backcountry
The journey is truly a thrill when you find a secret honey hole that takes a little creative driving to get to.

Bobber-Dogging for Steelhead from the Bank

By 10 Comments

Bobber Doggin diagram

The following is an excerpt from my guidebook, The Ultimate Guide to Steelhead Bank Fishing. Here’s a small section of the Float Fishing Chapter…

Bobber-doggin’ is hybrid technique that seems to be taking the steelhead world by storm these days – and though it’s most often practiced from boats, you can do very well with it from shore too!

There’s a lot of confusion surrounding this method – partly because everybody seems to have a slightly different way they go about it. I’ll give you the basic technique here and then you can tweak things as you see fit.

The best way to describe bobber-doggin’ is that it is basically drift fishing with a float. Unlike traditional bobber fishing where the bait rides suspended in the water column, the idea here is to have your sinker (typically a Slinky) tapping along the bottom – again just as if you were drift fishing. What the bobber does is act like a little tug boat, dragging your gear downstream.

The benefits of this presentation are:

  • You tend to get snagged much less frequently because of the line angle coming off the float.
  • Instead of having your gear drift in an arc (like regular drift fishing), it travels on a straight line, which enables you to cover water you couldn’t without the bobber.
  • You have a built-in bite detector.

When drift fishing, it can be difficult to distinguish the tap of your sinker from the often subtle bite of a steelhead. When bobber-doggin’ it’s pretty simple – when the float goes down you probably have a bite. At that point, reel until you come tight to the fish and then set the hook.

How to do It

While you’ll often see anglers in drift boats and jet sleds doing most of the Bobber-Doggin’, it’s a handy little technique off the bank too. The absolute best way to do it is “Poor Man’s Drift Boat” style (see the “Drift Fishing” chapter for more on that) where you cast at about a 45 degree angle upstream and then start walking down the bank as your rig drifts. Ideally, you want to have the bobber upstream of your position as you walk.

bobber_doggin_cc

Because the sinker is dragging the bottom, the top of the float should be angled downstream (exactly the way we don’t want it to be when fishing standard float gear), and you may see or even feel the sinker tapping the bottom.

I don’t mind a slight belly in the line near the float just to keep the gear moving along – but there’s a fine line here. Too much of a bow in the line and the rig will get dragged downstream too quickly.

The right speed is dictated by water conditions: Use more weight to slow your bait down if the water is high, cold and/or off-colored, and go with just enough to keep the offering ticking the bottom when the conditions are clear and the water has good visibility to it.

Rigging up for Bobber-Doggin’

Rigging up is essentially the same as described in the drift fishing section – with addition of a slip float and a bobber stop above the leader.

BOBBERDOG_RIG

Because you want the current pulling the rig along, bobbers with a wide profile to catch more current are best for this method. You can use the big teardrops – or better yet: buy the cheapie foam ones and cut the bottoms off so they are flat. That big flat surface gets pushed nicely by the current and keeps the rig drifting nicely. Aerofloat also makes a Bobber-Doggin’ model if you’d rather go that route.

BOBBERDOG_RIG

As far as depth goes, the rule of thumb is to set your bobber stop (measuring from the Slinky) to about 1½ times the water depth. You can adjust from there but that will get you started.

My Favorite Steelhead Fishing Gear

A standard float rod from 8½ to 9½ feet in length is fine and the style reel you use is totally up to you – spinning or casting both work fine. Spool up with 30-pound braid and then run an 8- to 15-pound fluoro or mono leader. I like bright yellow or white braided line so I can see my line in the water. To keep it from being too visible, however, I’ll take a fat black Sharpie pen and darken the top 20 feet of line.

On the business end, roe and a Fish Pill or Corkie works great on a No. 4 octopus hook. But anything you would drift for steelhead – plastic worms, nightcrawlers, shrimp, prawns, sand shrimp tails, pegged beads and yarn balls are perfectly suited to bobber-doggin’ as well.

For much, much more info, check out my latest Guidebook:

Test your Salmon, Trout & Steelhead IQ

By Leave a Comment

How well do you know your trout, salmon and steelhead? Well, take this little quiz and find out — and then read on for the detailed answers…

1) Which is the rarest salmon in the world?

  1. Pinook Salmon
  2. Co-Nook Salmon
  3. Formosan salmon

2) Where might you have a chance to catch an Atlantic Salmon and a Pacific Salmon in the same day?

  1. Yuba River
  2. Lake Biakal
  3. Lake Ontario
  4. Lake Pontchartrain

3) The IGFA All-Tackle World Record for Rainbow Trout is a 48-pound triploid from Lake Diefenbaker, Canada, but the record for steelhead is a 42 pounder caught in saltwater by a salmon troller…

  1. True
  2. False

4) Where did wrapping sardine fillets onto salmon plugs originate?

  1. Chetco River
  2. Rogue River
  3. Cowlitz River
  4. Columbia River
  5. Sacramento River
  6. Kenai River
  7. Skagit River

5) Which river boat pioneer used dynamite to blast a channel through Blossom Bar on Oregon’s Rogue River?

  1. Willie Illingworth
  2. Glen Wooldridge
  3. Everett Spaulding
  4. Woodie Hindman 

6) The Kastmaster is one of the most popular lures of all time. Which of the following was the early inspiration for the modern day version?

  1. EDA Splune
  2. Sputterbuzz
  3. Souvenir Spoon
  4. Colorado Pike’s Peak

7) How far do salmon have to swim upstream from saltwater before they reach the fish ladders on the Yukon River’s Whitehorse Fishway? 

  1. 1,132 miles
  2. 1,864 miles
  3. 950.2 miles
  4. 2,117 miles

ANSWERS

1) Rarest of the Rare

Formosan salmon (answer #4) are the rarest salmon in the world and their numbers are down into the hundreds now. They are a landlocked subspecies of the Cherry Salmon, reaching about a foot in length, and occur only in a few drainages in Taiwan, including the Chichiawan Stream and the Kaoshan Stream in the upper reaches of the Tachia River.

Pinook salmon (hybrid cross of Chinook x Pink) aren’t an everyday occurrence, but they do show up now and then in Great Lakes tributaries. In fact, Michigan even keeps state records for them. Not a whole lot is known about Co-Nooks (Coho x Chinook hybrids)…in fact, some argue they don’t even exsist…so if you guessed that, you’re not totally wrong.

2) East Coast vs. West Coast

Thanks to fish farming, you really could name a 100 rivers along the West Coast where net pen escapee Atlantics rub shoulders with Pacific Salmon. Several years back, the Green River in Washington got loaded up with the buggers and it’s happening more and more. The answer I was looking for, however, was #3, Lake Ontario, where trollers sometimes cross paths with imported West Coast Salmon and planted Atlantics while dragging flutter spoons along the temperature breaks.

3) Record Steelhead

Amazingly, the long-recognized record for steelhead is a 42-pound, 2-ounce behemoth that was not taken from some well-known stream like the Babine, Skeena or Skagit. It was caught by David R. White in 1970, who was trolling the saltwater for kings at Bell Island, Alaska. Crazy, huh? Bet that was a chromer!

4) Sardine Wraps

Well, these things are always tricky to try to trace back. Since no records are kept for such things and it was long before the days of Twitter and Facebook, all we have to go on is antidotal evidence. From talking to lots of folks, including the man himself, I’m going to say that Clancy Holt at Barge Hole on the Sacramento River in the 1950’s was probably where it all began.

5) Clearing the Way

While the contributions to riverboating from all of these gentlemen can’t be ignored, Wooldridge was the man responsible for clearing a path through Blossom Bar. A true pioneer, he made the first ever float down the Rogue in a hard boat in 1915 and then made the first ascent of the river in 1947…with a prop! There’s a tough to find, but amazing to read book about his life called “The Rogue, A River to Run” by Florence Arman. If you can get your hands on a copy, you’ll love it!

6) Early Days of the Kastmaster

Not long after Art Lavallee founded the Acme Tackle Company in 1952, he became aware of a lure called the EDA Splune developed by the Engineering Design Associates of Severna Park, Maryland. Intrigued by its design, Lavallee tested and modified the lure (he made it longer and gave it its jewelry-like finish) and then signed a royalty agreement with EDA and acquired the rights to market the lure. Eventually, it became the Kastmaster and the rest, as they say is history…

7) Going the Distance!

At 1864 miles, it’s one long trek up the Yukon River to the Whitehorse Fishway, which helps salmon continue on their journey past the Whitehorse Rapids Hydroelectric Facility, built by the Canada Power Commission in the 1950s. When they get there, the weary travellers then have to ascend a 1,200-foot long fish ladder! Throwing out the “upper Yukon” above the dam, that’s a 3,728-mile round trip from Whitehorse and back!