Inversion Alert

Foggy! That is the forecast for much of the long weekend here in Central Oregon. This fog is caused by a winter inversion, which is a phenomenon where the sun is bright and shining in the higher elevations, temperatures are actually warmer up high, and the lower elevations sit in a sea of fog. In the case of the Deschutes, the fog comes from a river that is warmer than surrounding air temperatures and this causes the condensation, or fog, that tends to hang heavy along the river’s edge. 

Our house is on a plateau above the river, sitting at about 1800 feet, and the river is below us at an elevation of about 900 feet. On mornings when we have an inversion going on, an elevation of 1800 feet is sometimes high enough to rise above the sea of fog, but sometimes we are sitting in the thick of the pea soup.

It is dark as I start writing this report, with about an hour to go until the sun rises, so I will not fully know the extent of the fog blanket until the sun makes its appearance on the horizon. I must get this report typed out so that I can return to my living room table where I left a huge feather sorting project last night. More on feather sorting later. 

The fog this morning - not quite as thick as expected. Might be sunny today.

The good news on the inversion is that it will create “cloudy” weather for most of the morning, and maybe for a significant portion of the day along the Deschutes. Yes, I know that it isn’t as “pretty” to fish in the fog or under the cover of clouds, but trout actually love that comfy blanket of clouds because it gives them a feeling of safety and the mayfly hatches are stronger and longer whenever the clouds (or fog) are present. 

In the brightest days of summer, where and when are you doing your best dry fly fishing? Those of you who trout or steelhead fish the Deschutes know that early morning, late evening, and cloudy days are some of the very best for successfully fooling trout on dries. If you are faced with a sunny day, it helps to chase shade until the sun gets too vertical for the canyon walls to provide that shade. Once the sun is high in the sky, dry fly trout anglers look for trees that hang over the river and provide a pocket of shade on the water. Not only is it a bit cooler in the shade, but the trout use that tree and the shade as cover from the osprey and other fish-eating predatory birds. 

Now, the downside to the inversion is that the fog will freeze on the roadways and may make a morning drive icy. Our South Wasco County highway crews will be out and about with de-icing trucks this morning, spraying the curvy roads that descend into Maupin. This will help, but please be careful on your way to the river. 

We have some very clear and clean water right now with lower than average flows coming out of the Madras dam. The morning will start off very foggy and may stay that way for quite a while today, hopefully at least through lunchtime so that the blue winged olives can emerge in droves. This small mayfly is the staple of our dry fly fishing throughout the winter, and I (frankly) struggle to come up with new things to say about the hatch after writing this weekly report for the past 25 years. They are SMALL, trout can be VERY picky about the pattern they will eat, you must fish these small flies (size 18-22) on SMALL 6X or even 7X leader/tippet - if you have 4X or maybe even 5X on you are likely to get rejection after rejection on your dries. 

If you are an absolute trout ninja with better than 20/20 vision and young eyes, then the BWO hatch is made for you! You are able to tie on these bitty flies without the need for glasses, and you are also able to spot these imitations on the water amidst a raft of natural mayflies during the mayhem of the hatch. For you ninjas, I suggest that you have a good selection of size 18-22 BWO dry fly imitations, a good handful of BWO cripple imitations, and a handful of just subsurface emergers or tiny bead head nymphs that will sit just at or below the surface film. Tie a dry or a cripple to the end of your 9 foot 6X leader and use a section of 6X or even 7X tippet to add the emerger or nymph to your two-fly rig. Cast that into a slick or a back eddy, one located just downstream of a rapid or riffle, and get ready for the heads to pop. The hatch will sometimes kick off as early as 11:00 AM - and the subsurface activity will be stronger in the beginning of the hatch. By noon, if there is going to be a good BWO event, you will see bugs in the air and sailing down the river with their slate-gray upright wings. 

If you are a bit more visually challenged, you can employ a trick that I have written about before, which is to use a larger dry as your first fly (it can be tied onto 5X tippet - this is not the fly with which we are expecting to fool the trout) and tie to that larger fly a tiny BWO dry or cripple using a 2 foot section of 6X or 7X nylon tippet. If you want to really add to the potential casting cluster, you could use a tag off your leader, a few feet above your bigger dry, using fluorocarbon tippet (which sinks) to tie on a tiny bead head BWO or even a tiny zebra midge. Now you have three flies on - two of which are in the game and one of which just helps you to spot the general region in which you have landed your trio of flies. Look for subsurface disturbances, little soft swirls, or the tip of a nose right in the surface film and lift your rod. 

As with all dry fly hatches on the Deschutes - it is a mistake to wait until you see a bunch of fish rising before deciding to set up a dry fly rig. Most of the Deschutes trout are very wary about making their presence known -they normally are not splashy risers. On many a day when I return from the river having hooked a dozen trout on dries, I will talk to other anglers who never stopped nymphing because they assumed that there was no chance of getting trout on dries - assumption made, of course, because they never saw any fish rising. Deschutes trout are wild and wary and the river is huge. Unless you are staring at an 18” diameter circle where the trout is holding, you are unlikely to see the dark snout rise slowly through the foam line to slurp a dry. 

Observation is key to success on the Deschutes. That, and being willing to employ a variety of tactics throughout the day and a willingness to move around a lot, crawl up and down the banks, and get into the places that are difficult to navigate and even more difficult to make a cast. 

If you are not a dry fly angler, or you just can’t be bothers switching your rigging or carrying an extra dry fly rod, nymph fishing will be your best strategy in the winter to finding good trout. Streamer fishing can be either red hot or ice cold - and that holds true throughout the calendar year on the Deschutes, but nymph fishing (in whatever style you prefer) is nearly always an effective and productive way to approach the Deschutes. 

The kick in the teeth fact about fishing is that not every day is a good day or productive or successful day for catching trout (or any fish for that matter). There are just some days when you are doing everything right, employing every nuance from your magical bag of fishing tricks, and you just can’t buy a fish for love or money. This happens everywhere I have ever fished. A banner day one day does not mean a banner day the next. Ever heard the phrase: “You shoulda been here yesterday!”? When a fellow angler says those five words, all I can hear is fingernails scraping down a chalkboard. Oh, that is a bit of a Gen-X reference, many of you might have had white boards with color markers in your classrooms. We had a blackboard and chalk. Sharp fingernails scraping through a chalky blackboard would curdle the oat milk in your millennial latte. 

So, nymphing and streamer fishing are your diversions today as you wait for the mid-day blue winged olive hatch. I just checked outside and the fog is thick even up here on top of the canyon. It is chilly out there, but not frozen at this elevation, so the curvy part of the road that descends into the town of Maupin should be fine for driving. 

Steelhead anglers should turn their attentions to the coastal rivers or to the metro rivers that have a winter run of steelhead. The Deschutes steelhead are old and dark and getting ready to spawn. This is not the time of year to chase steelhead on the Deschutes - they will be back in play next July when they return from the Pacific. 

If you want to know why I am sitting in front of a table with stacks of various sized feathers spread out on it, I will tell you that I am in the midst of a big project. In an effort to get some harder to find materials into our fly shop, I flew back east to a wholesale feather merchant’s warehouse. I spent several hours picking through stacks of birds to try to source some feathers and fur that I thought our fly tying customers would enjoy. I brought home wood duck, and Finn Raccoon, Jungle Cock, and Snowshoe Rabbit feet, full skins of pine squirrel, and striped skunk, piles of ring neck rump patches, and one full Blue Eared Pheasant skin - a top quality grade of bird that I have been tempted to breed and raise here at my own barn, but can’t quite bring myself to sign up for the full-time job of being a bird mom. Unlike the horse that I can board when I take off for two weeks at Christmas Island, having poultry requires daily maintenance and a Alcatraz-level enclosure to keep out the predators from the land and the sky. So, I have to buy my Blue Eared Pheasant in the dead form in order to get the feathers that are the closest imitation of the heron feathers used in many great fly patterns. 

I used to have a wholesale fly tying supplier who would sell us pre-sorted packages of BEP and even the wholesale price of these feathers was shockingly expensive. Now I know why. On Monday I sat in the back of the fly shop and plucked the entire skin clean. Nearly every feather piled up roughly in sizes went into cardboard flats for further processing. What type of further processing? Well, many of the feathers get a bit greasy from the skin of the bird - some greasier than others. Each one of these feathers must be washed. We did a bucket wash first and then had to individually stroke each feather under super hot water before laying them out onto a drying mat. Then, with the help of a hairdryer, we massage each feather under hot air until it is fluffy and clean. 

Feather washing station

Next, the sorting. For hours each day I stack like-sized feathers from the BEP until I have all of them stacked neatly in boxes - I got to that stage last night. Then I have to bag them. The largest feathers - the jumbo ones that are very sought after and of which there are less than 6 on each mature bird, are bagged in small quantities. The next sizes, extra large, and large, are the most popular for tying Spey-style flies like the Lady Caroline. Those go six in a bag. Then medium and small at twelve in a bag. Then the extra small ones, which are the most abundant. I have not decided how I will package those.

Unsorted feathers of various sizes

Sorting feathers and putting them into like-sizes

In terms of pricing the feathers, I looked all around on the web and only found one fly shop with BEP listed - all of the sizes but small were sold out. Their pricing seemed steep to me, but after a week of feather processing, it makes sense. If you are a fly tier and you really want a highly specialized ingredient for a pattern, you are very limited in your choices. This is why that book, The Feather Thief, made a lot of sense. A young man obsessed with tying the perfect Atlantic Salmon Flies resorts to breaking and entering natural history museums to steal bird skins for their feathers. 

For a serious tier to be able to get their hands on a half dozen large BEP feathers for less than $20 is a great deal when you consider that purchasing a full Grade 1 skin will set you back $300-400 or more. Yes, this all seems crazy - and I will probably get some comments here from people who find this whole feather business ridiculous - but I am filling a niche in the market for which there is considerable demand. Also, let’s not forget why we are selling Blue Eared Pheasants - they are a FARM RAISED domestic bird that is being used by fly tiers so that they can stay within the law. Great Blue Heron would be wonderful to tie with, but it is illegal to kill, sell, trade, or possess GBH feathers. Just one feather picked up off the river bank can land you in a world of trouble - so we are providing a legal and ethical avenue for fly tiers to pursue their passion. 

I made an instagram post last week about the feather haul - and I was holding up four stunning Great Argus Pheasant wing feathers. These giant and spectacular pheasants live in SE Asia, but it is possible for a licensed feather dealer to get the feathers from private breeders or from zoos. There are not parties of fly tiers out hunting these birds on the Malay peninsula! One commenter to my Instagram post was irate - saying that the sport was ridiculous and that fly fishing should be all about “purity” and not “exotic resources”. That one made me laugh because the majority of what I am bringing into the shop are feathers off of ducks that are hunted legally in the States (mallards anyone?) and or fur animals that are overpopulated and trapped because they are damaging property (skunks and rabbits). The most pure form of this sport that we participate in is in creating our own “lures” using natural ingredients from birds and mammals. Yes, back in Victorian times it was vulgar that thousands of bustards, and cranes, and egrets, and herons and blue jays, and lilac-breasted rollers, and so many exotic pheasants were killed for fly tying (but 10,000 times more often for the fashion industry). 

Today, laws are in place to protect the more fragile species. This is why we, as tiers, seek out natural materials that closely represent the fragile species. We dye turkey and chicken feathers all shades of the rainbow in order to avoid having to fly down to the amazon to murder hundreds of exotic parrots. If you want to tie using a Hyacinth Macaw parrot feather, you can get those from the pet trade - or you can dye a goose feather bright blue to have close to the same effect. We compete to this day with the fashion industry for the exotic feathers - look at the fashion runways, the Mardi Gras parades, or even your teen daughter’s hair if you want to see where a lot of our fly tying feathers have gone. Bucktail was in short supply and now skunk tails are in short supply because a certain Jewish Rabbi hat is made of natural fur (formerly sable, now skunk). 

Okay, that is my rant. I have feathers to source and daylight is upon us. I will post a picture in the opening of this report to show what the inversion looks like this morning. When I was up before the dawn letting Lupine out for her morning wee wee, it was a super thick fog. I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear the hundreds of Canada geese on our pond as they were taking flight into the fog. I couldn’t hear the wet slap of their flat feet as they ran on the pond to gain elevation. The honking and flapping was intense as they flew off into the dark foggy air. It was a really cool way to great the day for this bird nerd. 

We will be open today and Saturday, closed Sunday, open Monday. These are our winter hours - 9-5. Hope to see you in the shop.