One Angler’s Evolution
A reprint of an essay by WSC co-founder Rich Simms that first appeared in the 2014 April/May issue of the Salmon & Steelhead Journal
I caught my first steelhead in a creek near my home on the Kitsap Peninsula. I still vividly remember watching it hold in the tail out, lazily finning in the current with the surface swirls and cobble softly, hiding its presence. I recall looking at every detail of its color and exquisite spots and thinking I had caught the perfect fish. It measured 23 inches, the quintessential one-salt wild Puget Sound summer steelhead. I remember making a pact with my childhood friend to protect the spot from the other kids in the neighborhood, working hard to keep my ego in check and not reveal the secret spot.
1969 was also the year I first learned of a river in an outdoor magazine with the same name as my brother Dean. I was so taken with “my” discovery of this river and its legendary steelhead that I cut out the pictures and taped them to my bedroom wall. I stared at the photos with the same level of enthusiasm and excitement as the fish I carried home that summer. Based on the article and photos of this exotic locale, I was convinced that Dean River steelhead were unlike any other steelhead and had exceptional fighting quality finely tuned to defy the cataract they swam through in their migration. I knew someday I would fish there.
2009. The wings gathered lift as we left the Chilcotin Plateau and the dependable Beaver droned on as we gained altitude. Soon we entered the mountain chasm that opened up to the Dean’s anadromous ribbon. With my head propped by the window, I reflected upon the many steelhead adventures since my youth. I internalized the hidden anticipation I’ve been preparing for this sojourn my entire life. I first spied the river veiled through the trees, and as I stepped into the first run, I felt my hands tremble with excitement as I knotted the fly and loaded my rod for the first cast.
I stood in Sub-tidal, one of the Dean’s most famous steelhead runs. It is a run of contradictions. Behind me, mountains projected from the valley floor as Chatham Falls sliced and spilled into the forest canopy. In front of me, the Dean’s arteries disappeared into its saltwater channel. It is a perfect break but could be fished from both sides, with rocks exposing growth typically hidden at high tide. As I lengthened my casts, I could feel the pulse of expectation surge, a certain anticipation that had evolved into an unexplainable instinct. I don't remember the loop leaving my fingers as the line left my mends and tightened to its swing. But I remember a jolt and a reel’s click and pawl overtaking the sound of a flowing stream as the backing knot trailed away from the rod tip, creating a vanishing point. There were no leaps, but a sizable wild steelhead proved to me what it means to be designed to ascend the intense cataract upstream with a dominant run that leaves you shaking. The steelhead finally came to terms as it sneaked into the channel and rolled onto its side, displaying its perfect flanks reflecting the sea. The fly was unpinned from its jaw, and the doe returned to the river. My reward included rinsing my reel in the freshwater of the Dean.
When the opportunity to fish the Dean finally arrived, the fish personified wild in every sense of the word; the grabs, the runs, and the river that gave them life were wild. Perhaps there was a good reason it happened later in my angling life. Had it happened sooner, I’m not sure I would’ve appreciated the opportunity. In all likelihood, I would have been more concerned with counts and measures instead of the broader picture. I suppose that is perspective.
The Dean River steelhead certainly lived up to my childhood dreams, but I also regarded the river like that fish back in 1969 on my home creek in Puget Sound. Now my mind focused on what a healthy steelhead river resembles, how diverse wild steelhead are, and the habitat niches they colonize if allowed to do so.
That steelhead adventure to the Dean further enhanced my conservation ethos. It stimulated an even more, evolving desire to not only protect what we have left here, but at the same time, it kept me from being lulled into fantasy by great fishing elsewhere. The prospects of far-away flings are seductive, but the real action is the romance you have at home to explore on the low of a summer’s eve or a crisp winter’s morn.
The fish I caught in 1969 became more than a faded Kodak moment captured by my Mom’s Instamatic camera. It ignited a spirit within my being, creating an intimate connection between life and place. This ardor manifested further with an uncle, who had great patience and loaded me into his ’57 Chevy Carryall for odysseys around the Olympic Peninsula in search of steelhead. My first wild winter steelhead intercepted my Okie drifter on the West Fork of the Humptuips River on a quiet January afternoon while large, wet snowflakes vanished into green water, and it seeped through my used hip boots. Subsequently, each steelhead rekindled my passion, but I also became enamored with the streams that cloak them, forever linking me to the Rainforest Rivers of the peninsula. The North Puget Sound rivers became the Home Rivers of my “grown-up years” as I experienced the joys of the March and April catch-and-release fishery with brawny, wild steelhead who loved to eat my swung flies.
Loss is a heavy word that often yields heartbreak and blame. I have not laid out a cast on the Skykomish River for a catch-and-release season since 2000 due to the collapse of its wild steelhead population. The Olympic Peninsula rivers of my youth are imperiled to a similar fate and path by management plans that focus on aggressive harvest strategies between the state and tribes with intensive pressure by displaced anglers in search of the Holy Grail in one of the last, great wild places in the lower 48. The memories of my home waters have become as distant as my first steelhead. I was lulled to sleep by shifting baselines of what used to be and the hard reality of where we are now, fishing for crumbs.
They say that change doesn’t occur until the status quo becomes unbearable; the consolation of my loss was replaced with a passion for helping save wild steelhead and the rivers that nourish them. Although many of our home romances seem to be dwindling due to many issues, I know that true steelheaders are ardent creatures. Together, we can work harder for what we have close to us and celebrate small successes. Let us not allow setbacks to make us cynical and simply move on to the next productive system farther away and do nothing because the fishing isn’t quite as good as it used to be, or it’s closed because our precious wild steelhead is evaporating before our eyes.
Successes, I‘ve learned, in the world of steelhead conservation, are that positive changes are incremental and setbacks are disappointing, often leaving you scratching your head at the appearance of solutions that seem so frightfully obvious, yet so blatantly ignored, not only by the agencies but also in our angling community. It is indeed frustrating when fixes are not immediate. Still, you learn quickly that preparation and persistence are virtues that will carry the day of these incremental successes with the 10,000-foot view in mind as a must for wild steelhead recovery.
In our reality of diminishing returns and compromised rivers, conservation is not owned by anyone angling choice but by everyone who carries a cork. You and I are the advocates to try harder with a general public apathetic as wild steelhead lack the “panda effect” of other species; it is up to us to make it happen. As the tragedy of steelhead is being written, we have the power within ourselves to change the title by first standing up and forcing our agencies to change their focus. We can take our first steps by taking some time from our fishing to fill the department and commission hearings demanding we will not settle for the same failed management schemes and models of a fish which has a deep connection for many of us who angle for them.
In 1969, The Rolling Stones hymned the lyrics, “…you can’t always get what you want, but if try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need….”
Music is an excellent reflector of time and place, expressing a certain nostalgia that can encapsulate various vignettes in our lives. She was a summer girl, in which we shared a fishing rod that seemed to levitate in time as the small cutthroat circled in the pool below us and then faded like the September sun when she left without notice. Ultimately, it was a fleeting memory of infatuation filled with a sinking feeling only a twelve-year-old can confuse. What turned out to be real in the summer of love was simply a small rainbow trout that went to the vast ocean to get big, returning to the small creek near my home and allowing me the privilege to catch it, forever giving me a reason to try.