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I wanted to get out one fishing and hone my fledgling Euro nymphing skills one more time before today's major beginning to the fall rainy season, so last night I drove way up the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie to fish a section of fast pocket water for a couple hours.

Working my way up the line of slippery car-sized boulders and fallen trees that comprise the river bank, sandwiched between the roaring whitewater and impenetrable vegetation, was as much an exercise in gymnastics as in fishing. However, I found plenty of what I came for: interesting nymphing water and very pretty, very small coastal cutthroat and rainbow trout. The largest of the couple dozen fish landed were a pair of 9-inch cutthroat. I could have found slightly bigger fish downstream closer to town, but the seclusion of the headwaters was worth the extra drive.

With smoke from the west coast wildfires beginning to clear just a little, I took a few hours to fish one of the nearest access points on the Yakima River, where the fish are small and the water uncrowded. There were some stoneflies and caddisflies in the air--I collected one of each, representing the most abundant species--but there weren't enough bugs on the water to get the fish rising, except for the abundant 3-inch-long Chinook Salmon parr. I continued playing around with my new Euro nymphing rig and landed several rainbows up to 12", including my first double on that rod.

With limited weekends remaining for fishing before October gets really busy, my wife and I braved the smoke to float the Yakima Canyon from mile 20 down to Red's. We found very few steadily rising fish, just small ones sipping Baetid duns in a couple of spots, and picked up some rainbows up to 14" on miscellaneous attractor (Attractor: Flies not designed to imitate any particular insect, but to incorporate characteristics attractive to trout. When trout aren't feeding selectively, attractors often outperform careful imitations as searching patterns because they are easier to see and incorporate more strike-triggering characteristics. They include legends like the Adams, Bivisible, and Royal Wulff.) dries and nymphs. I've never seen so many deer along the canyon, perhaps a consequence of the fire burning out much of the adjacent habitat and feed a few weeks ago.

I did a fairly poor job of budgeting our time, stopping at every likely-looking seam early in the float and then having to blow through some of the best water in a rush to reach the landing before it was too dark to see. That's what I get for not learning the river yet. There were some nicer fish feeding at dusk and I missed a couple strikes, but I didn't have time to stick around and keep working on them.

I've been meaning to check out the scenic country headwaters of the Skykomish for a while, more for the scenery and variety than for the fish, which I expected to be mostly the same 6-12" rainbows and coastal cutthroats found in all the other rivers on the west slope of the Washington cascades. I was also looking to practice Euro nymphing some more, and the Foss River has some ideal stretches of pocket water for that. Starting late in the morning, I was successful early and often. Then, toward mid afternoon, the action shut down completely. I went from catching fish in every pocket to seeing no sign of them in extremely inviting pools. The water temperature was optimal, but the fish were just off.

For the last hour of daylight I drove to the South Fork Skykomish and fished a couple of promising pools. Fish finally started rising intensely right at dusk (to what, I'm not sure), and I caught six small rainbows on dries.

Throughout the day there were no noteworthy hatches, but I did find a couple of bugs worth photographing. I'm especially curious what a near-mature Ephemerellid nymph was doing in the river in mid-September, but I've not yet had time to put most of my recently collected specimens under the microscope and see what they are.

I had some errands down near the Green, so I stopped on the way back at Flaming Geyser State Park to wet a line. There was some nice-looking water, but I wasn't catching much until near the end of the day. I left early in the evening, not wanting to take my chances with the "high theft area -- do not leave valuables in your car" warning signs at the parking lot.