I moved to the Olympic Peninsula from New England in the fall of 2000, after several previous seasons of Alaska guiding. You should be using this fly anywhere that the big fish eat the little fish! So we are discovering that this fly has some application beyond the shores of Puget Sound country. And now some of my whacko smallmouth bass fishing buddies are cleaning up with the Chum Baby fly on the rivers and lakes too. Now is the time! This fly is also doing well up in Alaska, on the early season Lake Iliamna tributaries and Katmai National Park region Rainbows and Char, Grayling etc., that are feeding on fry and smolt in the rivers. As fly fishers it behooves us to learn about these things. These fish, both predator and prey alike, have evolved through this dance over many tens of thousands of years here. The Cutthroat will be feeding with reckless zeal. And just about the time that the post spawning Cutthroat, and some of their younger brethren, have dropped out of the rivers and streams, down to the estuaries and shorelines, the Chum and Pink salmon juveniles will be well distributed in the same places. This will continue for many weeks to come here. For the last month or more the regional biologists and technicians, using smolt traps, have been counting the out migrating fry as they move out of the gravel redds and down to the estuaries. ![]() And it doesn't hurt a bit that last year we had some very strong runs of these salmon returning to our watersheds to spawn. But by April they will be showing up in greater numbers up here, chasing the juvenile Chum and Pink salmon all over the place, and fattening up. With the milder winter we have had this year it is likely that most of them have already spawned and some are well on their way to the salt. So it's no surprise that we don't see very many of them on the beaches right now. March on the north Olympic Peninsula rivers is peak spawning time for most of our sea-run Coastal Cutthroat trout.
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