The Northern California Fly Fishing Board

Fished the Trinity Friday and Saturday this weekend. As expected, challenging fishing and somewhat crowded. But we did stick a few fish! The fish have not yet gotten into the upper river in significant numbers. Need rain. Most fish are hanging below Junction City, as are most of the fisherman. Yesterday we fished with Brian and Mike from the Fly Shop. Excellent guides and they worked really hard for us and helped all of us catch a fish during the day. Despite that our hot bite was very late in the day with a whole lot of river still to cover. We pulled into the take-out with very little light left on the horizen. They put in a long day and did a great job!

Here's a pic of a nice hot wild fish, my first of this year. This fish was only about 20 inches, yet was bright and feisty and had an adipose. It doesn't get better than this!

Two years ago we had monstrous runs on the Trinity, and visions of 20 and 30 fish days. That was the past. This year, and last, the river has returned to true steelhead fishing. A fish or two in a day should be the expectation. Any more is icing on the cake.

Today we visited the Trinity Hatchery, and saw quite a few salmon ascending the fish ladder, along with some really big steelhead in the hatchery raceway. Pretty cool stuff.

Phil wrote:
It doesn't get better than this!



Sure it does, you could of come across my little brother, he is a wild 50 pounder (the only way I am getting hooked is if someone snags me, and I am hotter than hot!)

I fished the Trinity this past weekend as well. I was hoping the rain would get the fish moving and spread them throughout the river. They were in the usual big holes, but also found them in the smaller pocket water as well, just not in big numbers. It was really cold in the mornings (low 30's) and overcast (low fog or something). The river levels look better than previous years, which is good...gave us more to fish.

On Saturday we floated the lower section (Junction City to Pigeon Point) and hooked 6 steelhead, but we only managed to landed 3 of them. They took the usual flies for this river: red copper johns, egg patterns and stonefly nymphs. We saw a decent number of fish in the river, but the numbers are still low compared to previous years. As Phil said, back to normal steelhead fishing. I was shocked to see there were very few boats or bait fisherman on the river. We had almost every pool to ourselves. I was able to fish holes that I've never been able to fish because people were always posted up. In fact we only saw two other boats the whole day. Fish-n-Game, as well as the other boats, said Friday was an absolute zoo, so maybe they all went to another section on Sat.

Sunday we floated a section further upstream (Steel Bridge to Douglas). The water was a little lower, but still enough to float it. We saw a lot of salmon in the river, but not as many steelhead. It was also a lot colder in the morning making it tough to fish. We caught one steelhead, nice 26 inch hen and one salmon. I wish that salmon was a steelhead; we thought it was at first. It would have been a monster. The salmon was still very silver and jumped a few times, making it pretty exciting. Both fish took egg patterns.