Document text
Fishermen hit Rogue trifecta Arnie Klott and his friends were not about to let a little water spoil their sporting weekend on the upper Rogue River. Saturday marked the reopening of upper Rogue steelhead bait-fishing after the two-month flyfishing season, and Klott had high expectations. Steelhead are eager bait-biters and the return of fishing with roe creates such bountiful catches that the event has earned the nicknamed "The November First Massacre." But hard rains had swollen the Rogue to a point where steelhead fishing Saturday and Sunday would be so unproductive that this massacre would be more like a skirmish. "With the water up, we thought, hey, there ought to be something else out there to find," Klott says. "And it's a good thing, too." Klott, Scott Ryerson and Todd Hobbs found that toting a rifle, rod and shotgun on their driftboat trip transformed a seemingly bad fishing bet into a winning trifecta. The trio took a steelhead, a blacktail buck deer and two wood ducks on their half-day float Sunday from Shady Cove to Dodge Bridge. "The Rogue Triple. The trifecta. The Triple Crown," says Klott, who owns a Medford printing business. "We were definitely adapting, taking what the river would give us." Beyond that, there was precious little giving on the Rogue last weekend, when more conventional thinkers who just fished for steelhead took home more frustration than fish. For instance, fishing guide Bill Urie's customers caught 28 steelhead on the 1996 Massacre. This year, they hooked just six. The culprit was a hefty rain that fell on the area Oct. 30-31, raising the Rogue more than four times higher than it was virtually all of October. Initial impulses along the river were to blame the bad fishing on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which upped water releases from Lost Creek Lake on Halloween and kept them high through Sunday. Out-flows from the lake went from 1,500 cubic feet per second Thursday to a peak of 3,700 cfs on Friday afternoon. The high, heavy water made driftboat rowing difficult and allowed the steelhead to exit their usual haunts and move around the river. The juggling water levels also shook the fish out of feeding mode. So in a matter of a few days, the scenario went from a low, predictable river with hungry and biting steelhead to a high, rough torrent that spread out the fish and took them off the bite. Yet the Corps isn't to blame. In fact, the upper Rogue would not have been significantly better if the reservoir and dam were never there. The peak out-flows of the lake Friday and Saturday were just barely higher than the in-flows at the time. And when the Corps on Sunday started aggressively releasing more water from the reservoir than was flowing in, even that flow was just 500 cfs higher than natural flows. While the corps didn't do anything to hurt fishermen, the water releases were not changed to help them -- and there's a good reason for that, too. At the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife's request, the Corps has kept a few feet more water in Lost Creek Lake than normal for this time of year. The ODFW wanted to keep the lake's out-flows no higher than 1,100 cfs for several good reasons, says Tom Satterthwaite, the agency's biologist who helps set reservoir releases. The lower October flows helped herd spawning wild spring chinook into the river channels, where their spawning is more likely to be successful. It also kept wild fall chinook from spawning among the spring chinook, and helped contribute to good water conditions for October flyfishing in the Rogue River Canyon downstream. Had the Corps drained more of the reservoir off in October, there would have been room to store more of that Halloween water to make the November First Massacre good steelhead fishing. But the reality is, most fishermen would rather have the benefits of low October water in exchange for the risk that one untimely rainstorm would create a lousy November First Massacre. "This just shows," Satterthwaite says, "that there's more to the issue of flow releases than what appears on the surface any given day." It appeared to Klott that Sunday was not to be a day of giving among steelhead. So he, Ryerson and Hobbs thought about adding bucks and ducks to the equation. "We really planned only on fishing," Klott says. "But we always, at this time of year, throw a shotgun and rifle in there -- just in case." Hunting from a boat along the upper Rogue is legal as long as shots are fired safely and outside city limits. First, Hobbs shot two wood ducks downstream of Shady Cove's city limits. Then, Klott caught and released the 5-pound wild steelhead near Takelma Park. The buck came last. It was a forked-horned deer that Ryerson shot along the river a short distance above Dodge Bridge. "We spread it all out between us," Klott says. "We didn't want to be greedy." The trio put the ducks and buck into Hobbs' driftboat, and left the Rogue at Dodge Bridge as perhaps the most successful sportsmen on an otherwise unsuccessful day on the upper Rogue. "They were the same results we were expecting," Klott says, "but not exactly how we planned the weekend to be." Mark Freeman covers the outdoors for the Mail Tribune. He can be reached at 776-4470. Outdoor Journal main page