Holy SMOKES! Killer stuff guys

THE BEST LUNCH BREAK EVER!!! Thx guys....

looks like one of those "lifetime trips" truely jealous, i hope someday I'll be able to spend money on something equal to this...some seriously great shots to, the ride in and several great action shots..i like the victory shot of the fish you got to turn, great hold, background,focus, everything! you guys are truely setting the bar for us...

not to mention keeping the kleenex corp in business from wiping up all this drool... great job guys!

Simply majestic!!!

Wow! What a trip! You do such an excellent job with words and pictures telling a story. Thank you.

looks like a killer trip , thanks for sharing and telling..


could of used a few more moon photos but overall well done!

One of the most amazing threads ever.

Wow!

Take note on this future Redington catalog cover shot....





Stam's fly floggin tail-wrist hand is pinkie extended.











































































jk, sure your missing the CR 290/296 & curados pretty bad @ this point

c/22

Man oh man! What I'd give to fish in a place like that! Oh wait, I just returned home from the Dean yesterday to spend all afternoon and evening washing 8 day-old camping and fishing clothes and putting gear away. Good thing Coley G's photos are second to none, as I took pics of many of the same bits of scenery on my $99 camera that gave up the ghost as we were flying out of the valley Wednesday afternoon. I haven't checked yet to see if the photos on the memory card are still OK.

My old BC friend Jerry Wintle didn't fish every steelhead river in the world, but he fished most from California's Klamath to B.C.'s storied and unnamed rivers. Of them all, he remarked that the best summer steelhead river in the world is the Dean. Of those who have sampled many, I've known of no one to argue the point. I'm not about to.

We flew in Aug. 6, four days after CG, AP, and Stam to Giant's, the usual upper-most drop in spot. It's a great camp site, with a plywood counter and shelf for camp kitchen duty - the only one like it we found. Unfortunately, while at Giant's, you fish only Giant's. As our fearless explorers reported, with long rapids upstream and down, it's a long wader shredding hike to any other fishable water, and you come to Eagle run easy enough when you float down to it. Moose Pool was hard on gear for me. It seems like I was trying to chop wood the way I kept hitting over-hanging alder branches with my rod tip. I pulled snake guides right out of the wraps on two different rods. Now I have some rod mending to do, but fortunately didn't break any rod sections.

Although the water was over a foot higher than normal for the season, the river was nonetheless imminently fishable. And a good thing too, as I fished the same pool over and over and over, which is decidedly not my usual style. The biggest hassle was being limited to a relatively small amount of water to fish each day, unless we wanted to make only a 2 or 3 day float trip of it. Of course, not much about this river fit my usual style, but really, I'm not complaining.

The upper river was running at 60* F and was very conducive to dry fly fishing. But it was more conducive to wet flies, as my partners caught fish while I stuck it out waking dries most of the time. I caught 3 on top, including 1 on an upstream dead drift presentation. Later I switched to sunk flies, purely for scientific reasons to acquire a larger catch sample.

The Sakumthat was running 54* F and cooled the Dean noticably. The next little glacial stream cooled it even more, as the mainstem Dean was a nice 52* F downstream of it, good for the fish, but chilly when bathing in the shade.

Now for the scientific analysis: Do Dean River steelhead really back off and charge downstream 20 yards to nail a fly? No; in fact they don't. It just feels like it. My lifetime experience is that about 20% of summer steelhead are screamers (no, not as opposed to moaners), meaning line and backing-ripping runs with lots of jumps. Our collective sample of Dean River fish showed almost the inverse, with about 75% or more being of the screamer variety. I caught one hen that jumped 9 times, with up to 30 yds of backing out along with the 120' fly line. While the Dean is not a small river, neither is it a particularly large one, flowing about 4 kcfs in the upper reach and 5 kcfs downstream of the Sakumtha. Dean fish are also a bit girthier forward of the dorsal and around the caudal than say, their Skamania summer run counter-parts.

About 90% of Dean steelhead are 2-salt fish. The majority of our catch were 28-30", with a single 26 and 27 and 3 at 32". There may have been a couple of 31s. The funny optical illusion is that a fish being landed that you swear is going to tape 34" only taped at 30". This happened a couple times. Sure, 20 pound steelhead are caught in the Dean, but they are very uncommon.

I recognize the rainbow photo as the place we camped on our last night. Thanks for making the nice level tent site guys. However, that was our most unproductive camp water of the trip. Probably just an anomoly, as the fish seemed to occur in pulses.

How the heck did you possibly make 1100 pounds and still include 5 cases of beer? I need some packing lessons from you guys. We couldn't make the weight with beer, so we limited ourselves to 3 bottles of Scotch (one was actually Irish Jamison's) and a 4-liter box of red wine. That hot weather left me begging for a beer, but I toughed it out . . . until the wine and whisky was gone before crumbling. We showed up with 1136 pounds and got it down to 1126, and they allowed us with that. How much did your raft and frame weigh? Our 3 Watermasters totaled 120#, which I expected to be significantly less than a 13 or 14' raft with rowing frame, even stripped down as Stam described.

Was the Dean trip epic? I don't know. I read about "epic" fishing experiences 2 or 3 times a week on the internet, suggesting that the quality of being epic is rapidly falling. The combination of the scenery or setting, the river, and the fish make this one unsurpassed for me.

I'll check my camera and see what the status of my pictures is.

Sg

Seems you had a satisfying trip Salmo.

Looking forward to it Salmo. These kind of experiences are always inspiring though the Dean is not exactly a secret, it's remote location and the fact the it takes much effort and planning make it a definite must experience. Someday man, someday.

This fall, there will be some extra planning and recon in order for Saturdays and Sundays up in the northern haunts, though I have to say there are indeed some areas the "MOE" missed in trying to keep us yanks out. Should make things interesting but I like the challenge.

Now that Sg posted on his trip, this thread is complete.

"The Dean in 2014" has a nice ring to it.

Sg, you can get a 13' Maravia raft around 100-110 lbs so it is conceivable that with a simple rowing frame your 3 Watermaters may not way much less than that.

Yes Mr. Garcia, I had a very satisfying trip; so much so that I really enjoyed sleeping in yesterday and today.

Thanks for the hint Stam, you clown. I'm sure we had at least 2 thermometers between us, preventing us from including a few cases of beer in our cargo. I thought your secret was having all 3 of you cozy up in a 2-man mountain tent. I'll check with Coley for more details on packing light. Truly I thought I was packing "light." I even went out and bought a high falutin' 16 oz. air mattress to offset my 3.5# basecamp thermarest to shave off some weight. However, the notion of 8 consecutive nights of freeze dried dinners turned me off. So I filled a 15 qt. cooler with 4 frozen dinners and breakfasts I prepared at home. I put the vacuum packed meals in the cooler, filled it half way with water (in 2 stages) and put the whole she-bang in the freezer. That worked very well, including driving through 100* heat on the ride up, giving us 4 fresh dinners in camp. But it added 26# to the load. Then we went freeze dried for the remainder. It kept me from starving. My gear, WM, and self weighed in at 399#. Even if I were to lose 10 or 15#, that's still a lot of weight.

Notes from the chronicles:

Overheard from one angler bathing in the river one sunny afternoon -"If April Vokey doesn't saunter by about now, that's her loss." Enough of joking about Ms. Vokey however. You'll read why.

About the river, there are lots of rapids, class II and III I think. Watermasters are rated to class IV, but I suspect that is only true if the operator is also rated to class IV. I can attest that a Watermaster loaded down with an extra 140# of camping larder is far less maneuverable than with a typical day load. This is worth mentioning because David got too close to a large rock, with his raft sideways, and capsized just downstream from the slide (recognizable by the half a mountain that slid away recently). He was able to stay with his raft and didn't pop the cord on his inflatable PFD until the raft was caught in the main current and moving toward the downed logs and trees along the left bank. At that point he swam for the right bank where one of April's clients grabbed him by the yoke. April, who's other client was playing a fish from the boat, put him ashore and to her credit ran her boat up and moved David's raft away from the logs and over to safety on the right bank. The young woman has my respect for her generosity and river skills.

All's well that ends well as they say, but talk about a white knuckle moment when we couldn't see where David was. Hence a critical reminder about keeping boats away from log jams and never get sideways on the upstream side of a rock that is bigger than your boat. All David suffered was the loss of two rod sections, a bit of pride, and a total soaking. I rowed the river with standard WM oars, but if I were doing it again I'd upgrade to the heavy duty ones and sacrifice some weight elsewhere. The heavy duty oars have a longer ferrule - a natural weak spot - and heavier gage tubing.

Other random thoughts:

I've known guys that for years flew in to the lower Dean and camped for a week or two, fishing the available water. One thing that made me grateful for floating the river was how little water is available to the stationary campers and to the clients of the upper-most and lower-most lodges. But I don't like to fish the same water over and over. Two huge back-to-back floods in 2010 and 2011 totally changed the lower Dean according to folks who have fished it for many years. The Totem club has moved their camp from river right to river left where they now have access to only 3, maybe 4 pieces of water, and only one of them is truly high quality based on my overview. The old Motel run of long term fame is straight, shallow, and fast, although it does have a good piece at its lower end. It produces a lot of fish, but only because every fish pauses there briefly to rest after cresting the lower canyon. But it's not a very cool pool to fish IMO.

My camera still won't work, but the memory card is OK, and I uploaded the photos to my computer. When I get some re-sized I'll post them up.

Sg

S. salar,

Joe and David fished 15' type 8 tips, same as winter fishing. I hung up with a fast tip, so I mainly used a type 3 and unweighted flies.

Sg

We wondered about the Watermasters. Particularly at the higher flows we saw, I wouldn't have wanted to be in anything small that I coundn't row hard if I needed to. There is certainly a lot of force in that river. There were plenty of spots where you had to plan ahead to avoid trouble. I'm glad you friend was OK. The "rainbow" campsite apparently has had 2 people die right in front of it in the last couple of years. One was a wading slip and the other was a boat accident. Both ended up dead in the logjam directly across from the campsite.

I'm glad you had a good trip!

I have a photo of the boat in the log jam up above, or what's left of it, that is. I'll try to post it.

You did get a picture of April Volkey...



right?

Threads like this are why I'm here, thank you for sharing in your adventure. What a great read!