Kittee's first time in two seasons -OR- They're Baack

Stardate 090107

Kittee sparkles while fishing upriver.

It was yesterday that Kittee and I decided not to use our Oregon State Fishing License to go fishing. It was about 4 p.m. when we were putting on our studded fishing boots and heading for the river to get onto the 3 o'clock bite. Kittee wanted me to go upstream first, so I hit a couple of spots to warm up the casting arm, develop my aim and move up to the first recently constructed cross-vane rock structure/ root wad. There I laid a Krystal Flash Elk Hair Caddis between the two. POW! first fish of the day was an 8" redband from right behind that rock.
Kittee had started fishing the first root wad structure coming up stream and was having trouble casting her fly with a 12' leader. I went back down to help her cut off about 4' of leader, and her fun started immediately.

Kittee waves while making a nice back cast...
they didn't teach her to do this at law school.

A happy fly fisherwoman
at work, in her own backyard.

Now, what a mess this is.

Kittee's last cast of the day somehow got a wind knot (here we call them "Kittee knots") in the leader that polished this fishing outing off. We had fished up to the upper pasture property line and exited the river where the excavator had made a gentle sloping exit ramp the week before, very convenient get-out/ take-out for our ranch fishing.

We fished for about two hours. During that time we saw, 4 adult salmon and one jack. We caught maybe 20 steelhead / salmon smolts between us and Dale caught four or five 8+ inch redbands. We also ran into a couple of other fly fisher coming downstream, one saying he had caught a 15"er upriver. We were glad to hear that.

Kittee and I were quite happy with the work done on our stretch of the river by the CTUIR and the results of 8"-9" trout that were now moving into the new fish habitat structures.

Dale --- a day in the life at McKuster Ranch