Cutthroats continue to fire angler's imagination

By Chester Allen | The Olympian • Published October 03, 2008

The humid breeze carried a rich, acrid scent that reminded me of a wet, over-fertilized lawn.

That's the odor of spawning, dying chinook salmon in the clear, low water of our own Deschutes River.

The odor grew thicker and stronger as I got near the water. I could see spawning fish — tails ragged and white from digging nests in heavy gravel — in the flowing riffles.

It's easy to see the nests — called redds — because they're patches of bright, clean gravel on the river bottom.

Dead, spawned-out salmon littered the bottom and tangled in downed trees submerged in the still backwaters. Fresh waves of salmon zipped through shallow shelves, leaving torpedo-like wakes.

I put on my polarized sunglasses and sat on a gravel bar while I rigged my fly rod and set up my camera. I don't fish for the salmon. I fish for the cutthroat trout that hover just downstream of the spawning fish to eat eggs drifting out of the gravelly nest.

In a week or so, some cutts will start eating the dead, decaying salmon. The current strips the flesh off the bones and sends it downstream to the greedy trout.

The camera is for the salmon — and maybe one of the big cutthroat that crave salmon eggs and flesh in the fall.

The biggest cutthroat of the year come to my egg flies when the chinook salmon do their dance of death and life in South Sound rivers. The Nisqually, the Skokomish and the rivers that flow into Hood Canal also offer great cutthroat trout fishing during the salmon spawn.

I usually lose these big cutts to the snags or my own excitement.

But I always recall the giant cutthroat trout I saw a few years ago on our little Deschutes River. A man popped out of the streamside brush near the golf course with a giant fish. At first, I thought it was a coho salmon.

It was a huge cutthroat trout that was more than 20 inches long and thick. It was well over five pounds. Most of the Deschutes is catch-and-release for cutts, but the man hooked and landed that monster downstream of the Henderson Avenue Bridge, so he could keep the fish.