3-05-04 - The rain stopped right on schedule at 5:00 am..we didn't get the "light, quick rain" we were hoping for.

Gerry Greene is kinda wondering where to start...

Not ideal for Dale's first trip, but you never know...

As the clouds moved out we got some nice scenery.

MP, David, Fat and Dale. (Copyright 2004 Gerry Green)

Bet you didn't know that the Pike has several spate driven tributaries.....

3-5-04 - Not quite Biblical Floods...

Waters Fished: Pike River
Fish Caught: 0/1 personally
Outing Date: 3-5-04
Weather: Totally Cloudy
Air Temp: 40's F heading up to almost 60F by the time we left
Water Temp: 41F
Water Level: INSANE - approximately 600 cfs at the time of fishin.
Water Color: Visibility down to a few inches
Fish Species: Steelhead
Pattern Fished: Huge Goo Flies
Pattern Color: Blue & Chartreuse..it worked yesterday
Fishing Quality: Unfortunately VERY VERY BAD.

Back at it again, and again FAT literally says "wake up sleepin' beauty, it's time to go fishin". It's been raining overnight, we expected this. We drove through the rain to meet up with David and his buddy Dale; Gerry Green made it out for one of his rare outings. At 5:00 am we're getting suited up and it's just a drizzle; for once the Weather Channel was dead on, the rain basically stopped at 5:00 am.

Normally a rain bumps the flows a bit, maybe 50 to 100 cfs...entirely normal and easily fishable with the right amount of lead. As we hiked in it was dark...we could see the stream was up but couldn't really tell HOW MUCH.

It became painfully clear once we got on the water and started fishing at the legal time (5:48 am). Literally the flows were up by several FEET...fish would only be hooked into if we found slow pockets (really HARD in these flows) and got down.

Our best hopes ended up being 2 slow seams with eddies; we all gave them a shot. I was the only one to hook up with something....it *could* have been steel or it could have been a sucker...I don't think I'll ever be able to tell because I brought it up to the surface and it rolled right, out into the high flows, and my line came wizzing back at me.

Things just weren't working out...tons of debris was coming downstream, constantly fouling our lines and flies. By 7:00 am, we called it. I have to give credit where it's due...David and Dale really stuck it out on a morning that originally had shown lots of promise but turned out to be pretty though. I will say this much, probably 99.9% of the Pike would be unfishable in a flow like this...there's only a few key spots you're going to find fish.

The worst part was that as we left, we realized the Pike had come UP another 3-4 inches from the time we got there.

  MP