Angling Publications - Index

Angling Publications - april2008 - Index

60
Nervous water is what we watch for—a trembling twitter that barely
quivers the surface, a vague almost indefinable agitation that flutters the mirror and is easily mistaken for a zephyr.
Perched like standing herons in small boats drifting a few yards from the beach, we clutch our rods and stare
through polarized glasses for nervous water, because the water is made nervous not by an errant breeze or contrived
in the imagination at the corner of an eye. It is produced by the swift tail flashes and swirling slashes of gamefish
on the hunt: predatory, beach-cruising, sea-run cutthroat trout and irascible young salmon, killing food and stirring
the surface with their mayhem.
These aggressive fish are the basal ingredient driving one of the hottest new fly flings in the Pacific Northwest—saltwater
hunts in the shallow, protected edges of bays and sounds of Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and Alaska for
6-weight fish—sea-run cutthroat and immature resident coho and chinook salmon from 12 to maybe 25 inches.
It’s largely a catch-and-release fishery in protected, inside waters that seem to be ideally sculpted for fly fishermen;
some in small boats, others walking and casting from beaches. The heart of this sport pounds loudest in Puget Sound,
a great sprawl of inside saltwater lapping at Seattle, with lesser flutterings in the dozens of irregularly-shaped bays and
sounds on Vancouver Island, up British Columbia’s sunshine coast, and south into the Oregon estuaries—Tillamook,
Yaquina, Alsea, Siuslaw and Coquille bays.
The quest to spot and cast to nervous water is certainly not necessary to the sport, but it does elevate the game
from the unpredictable surprise tug found in blind prospecting to the high-tension suspense of spot-and-stalk. And
that’s just one of the reasons that fly fishing along these graveled edges of protected saltwater for trout and salmon is
rapidly exploding along every significant pea-gravel clam beach from Carr Inlet to Clayoquot Sound.
After a near-fatal battle with mismanaged catch-and-kill limits, saltwater cutthroat are now protected by strict
retention prohibitions and are on the comeback in Washington State. In many areas, coastal cutts are now the core
of the saltwater fly fishery.