I have been in the FATC a long time, since the beginning. In those early days when there was maybe one big trip a year a few of us liked to sit around and discuss future potential exciting trip options. Over the years many of those trips have been taken. But one that always interested me but never really got much traction with others was trying Northern California. The magazines all suggested there were many attractive possibilities. This year I decided to make a trip out to NoCal to see for myself. There are two main options: around the Tahoe area or further north up around Redding. I chose the latter because it would let me hit a couple of National Parks as well. I chose May because it would be less crowded, and supposedly a great time to fish dry flies. Turns out only one of those proved correct for this trip. I found a guide, Colin Coogan through the Orvis Website and told him I preferred wading options and dry flies if possible.  I fished 3 rivers with Colin; Hat Creek, The McCloud River and Fall River.   

Hat Creek flows out of Lassen Volcanic National Park, gets dammed up and then let out as a Tailwater. The upper part is sandy and flows out into a broad windy meadow. This time of year, stone flies are quote prevalent, so the hope was to fish these patterns. However, the fish were primarily taking nymphs subsurface. We tried various dry flies with little success and ended up fishing mostly chubbies (to mimic the stone flies a bit) with various nymph droppers. We managed to catch a few but it felt like we should have done a lot better. We also fished the lower section where it flows into a little lake. We had more hits here on the chubby and I caught a nice brown. The colors were a little odd (picture included), but I was told that’s specific to hat Creek which because of a combination of the food source and the black volcanic rock bed the river flows over. Okay-I’ll take their word for it.

The next day we fished the McCloud River. This one I had heard of before. It’s a gorgeous trout stream. Of all of the rivers I have fished I would say it is one of my new favortites in terms of aesthetics. This is what you think of when you think about mountain trout rivers. The McCloud flows from runoff and an underground glacier in Mt. Shasta to form Lake McCloud. The river flows out of the lake. Because of the glacier lake McCloud has a very distinctive Green color but the river is beautiful. There first 10 miles are public access, though hard to get to. It’s a very rough dirt road. The next four miles are owned by the nature conservancy. They only allow 10 anglers on this stretch at any one time. Five permits are reserved in advance and 5 are available on a first come first serve. The last 10 miles are owned by two fishing clubs. We managed to get there in time and got to fish this stretch. We did better her fishing the same rig. Chubby with nymph dropper. The river has 2 varieties of rainbow. The red band and the silver Shasta. We are very familiar with the red band because that is what is used as stocking fish in much of the US including here in MO. Most of the fish I caught were on the droppers but I managed to catch a few on the chubby but nothing on the pure dry flies we tried. The one thing to be careful about out here are Rattle Snakes. They are quite prevalent out here. We encountered one on the trail.

The last day I agreed to fish out of a boat which is not my favorite . We fished Fall River. It is a board slow moving river that winds slowly through about 20 miles of meadow. It can’t be waded. I knew I was in trouble when Colin explained they don’t drift this river. All the boats have outboard motors. You cruise to a spot you like, anchor so the boats sits perpendicular to the river and the let your rig drift down river up to 50-60 ft. If the fish were taking dries we’d site fish to the rises but alas that didn’t happen. It was drifting nymphs. There were a lot of problems with this for me. The fish never took a fly within 25ft of the boat so you did have to drift it far. I’d have 30-40 ft of line piled up next to my feet in the boat so that was a disaster at times. You’d get a hit and have to set the hook which for the first couple of hours was a disaster, with the rig flying back into the boat more often than not. Finally, Colin was able to get me on a way to do it successfully. If tried a strip set it didn’t work and just raising my whole arm really fast didn’t work. To successfully set the hook I had to use only wrist, which Colin thought was a fast twitch response. Hard to do but it worked. Using just the wrist I started getting successful sets. It also worked better to set opposite the mend and not up. Once you felt the fish then strip like crazy. If you stripped and set at the same time the fly ended up coming back at you in the boat. Anyhow I managed to catch 4-5 in the last hour so it worked but I can’t say I really enjoyed the Fall River experience. I’d much rather have been on the McCloud.

Overall, it was a successful trip. I got to see 3 new rivers. It was not crowded at all. Colin says they don’t get a lot of out of state fisherman, maybe because there isn’t the allure of big 20+ in fish anywhere. Most fish are between 10-15in. I was lucky to get a couple around 16 in. I plan to go back but I can’t say this is a bucket list destination. If you are looking for something different catching all wild trout and with other outdoor activities, it’s a great option.