The rains that came over the Thanksgiving holiday finally pushed all of our coastal rivers past their low flow threshhold, opening the door to a late fall King fishery. The rains delivered, but the fishing never seemed to kick off. I fished the Smith during what I would call perfect conditions for swinging flies. The river jumped to over eleven feet at the Jed Smith guage and fell to a perfect 8ft by the next morning. Normally 8ft would be low and clear, but all of the leaf litter gave the river a heavy tea stain, an uncharacteristic color for the Smith, which usually runs glacial or gin clear.  Imagine fishing the perfect swing run on the lower Trinity River but you might shake hands with a 20 + pound king. 

Migrating down the coast some of the smaller systems were in decent shape following the rain. I saw some nice Coho caught on gear and a few Kings rolling but all in all it felt like the fish that were staging to spawn ran up as quickly as they could when the doors swung open. Perhaps due to the prolonged dry weather that persisted thoughout October by the time we did get rain most of the salmon had simply run out of time. The one Jack I did manage to swing up seemed to speak to this. It had obviously been sitting around in the estuary for a while.

Now is the time to start looking ahead to the first waves of winter steelhead that always make an appearence in December. More rain is forecast for this weekend and sporadic rain is to follow into next week. If we get another good bump for are coastals it should be game on. Reports of half pounders being caught have come in from the Smith and Eel. A sure sign that the big adults are on their way.