6-16 SS River Caution

 Caution when it comes to the state of rivers in the Northwest.

According to reports the Yakima  Has great Chinook runs, the Willamette at the mouth of the Sandy was recently stacked up with boats fishing

for Springer's. But in some parts of the Northwest, between rain and serious snowmelt runoff, rivers are raging. Josh Mills says don’t try and be a hero: “What it really does is it puts us over on lakes in some cases until 1 July when things really start to drop and normalize. Just as a word of advice, nobody needs to try and be a hero and go and fish these rivers at any time when they are in flood stage. Fishing is going to be lousy and downright dangerous. One of the things to pay attention to is the United States Geological Survey has graphs that you can go to and gauge, let’s say it’s the St. Joe River, it will tell you in comparison to normal where it should be and where it shouldn’t be. It will tell you where it should be relative to statistical averages of where it should be at that time. What it does to the fish is it is a pretty tough time for them  but they are very resilient. They can find refuge. They can duck into side channels and back eddies and things like that, and hunker down below rocks. They’re also looking for debris and mud levels. It also gives us the chance as fishermen to grow re-learn your own rivers. Where you used to go catch steelhead maybe 200 yards down river now because it has re-routed some of the structure, some of the boulders, the bottom substrate and what that does is that it makes the brand new river.