The countdown to California's General Trout Season Opener is underway (it's this Saturday, 4/28 for those of you who lack a sense of drama), and unlike some people I'm not about to
go all postal on my co-workers. But I am willing to say I'm planning to bypass the places where the popular kids hang out in favor of something more remote.
In fact, I'm cooking up an improbable plan to access one stream (with a fallback stream in mind if I can't) which one friend described as "hair brained."
I'm tempted to agree with him, but fly fishing's history is riddled with hair-brained ideas (Fly a light plane to fish undiscovered waters? Fish fulltime and write about it for a living??).
One more can't hurt.
For those of you looking for bigger waters, here's the wholly unguaranteed skinny on the local flows:
A couple of 80-degree days means the runoff has started, though cooler temps for this week (50s and 60s) might knock the flows back just a little bit.The
Upper Sacramento is running around 4,000cfs, but with temperatures in the 50s and 60s forecast for the week (a lot cooler than the 80 degree temps of the last couple days), it will likely fall some, though I doubt it's what an effete dry fly snob would consider
prime.
The Lower McCloud River is more regulated, and at this moment, the
flows at Ah-Di-Nah are below 420 cfs. Not great, but not bad. The dam is
releasing 165 cfs, so Hawkins Creek is pushing out a couple hundred CFS.
Interestingly, we now see a flow gage for the McCloud "near the town of McCloud" -- which is interesting given the river never really gets that close to the town.
As near as I can tell, this is a flow gage for the Upper McCloud below Big Springs but above the lake, and I haven't experienced it enough to know how to translate it back to the Upper McCloud, though a simple extrapolation (subtract 800 cfs for Big Springs) suggests the Upper McCloud is rolling awfully high.
Hey, I'm not Carnac or anything.
More as it happens from your Leading Opening Day News Source
("We Report, You Go Somewhere Else."), Tom Chandler