Summer cutts start the day off the right way

Chester Allen | The Olympian • Published September 12, 2008

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A forest is shades of gray and black just before dawn lights up our world.

A little stand of seedling maple trees looked like giant, spidery mushrooms in this colorless time between night and day.

I was crunching down the trail to a favorite Puget Sound beach — and making lots of noise to alert the skunk patrol — to catch a falling tide.

Low light and flowing water is a good combination for sea-run cutthroat trout fishing.

I should have strung up my rod and tied on a fly before I left the station wagon, but my mind shifted out of gear in my eagerness to get to the rocky, shelly beach.

Halfway down the trail, I remembered that my tiny flashlight needed new batteries, but I did have the most important thing: new flies — inch-long, slinky marabou creations with black heads and tails.

A skunk scuttled across the trail about 50 feet away, and I stopped to let the critter get out of squirting range.

While I waited, I thought about why I was rattling around outdoors at 5:15 a.m.

It all started with this e-mail from my fish-crazed friend Greg Cloud:

"Huge hatch of red and black pile worms. One to 1.5 inches long. Black head and tail and kind of a bloodworm red in the middle. Squirming all over the surface. Cutts not at all interested in any of my fly offerings, as they must have been porked with worms. I could see them taking these things like taking a nymph. Just a gentle slurp."

Wowsa!

I immediately set work aside and called Cloud, who fishes pretty much constantly and knows Puget Sound like local kids know their cell phone texting keys.

"It was amazing," Cloud said. "Fish eating dumb protein everywhere — HA!"

Cloud — a biologist by training — then sent me a photograph of one of the marine worms.

Yeah, we're crazy that way.

I tied up those flies — basically a stripped-down wooly bugger — checked the tide tables and went to bed early. I didn't sleep well — I never do when there are fish to be caught in the morning — and I woke up before the alarm.

When I finally got to the beach, the falling tide was making little rips — the seam between fast and slow water — around bags of oysters.