Speywater Lodge & Floats Scott O’Donnell’s Passion for the Ronde
By Charles Gehr Photos By Walter Hodges
The Grande Ronde provides the ultimate setting for anglers to improve their spey casting and steelhead fishing skills.
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f the name of this lodge seems biased, wait until you meet the guides! Located on the Grande Ronde River near Troy, Oregon, this low-key, high-value operation is where some of the Northwest’s finest steelheaders and spey casters congregate for two months of guiding and instruction. Renowned spey instructor Scott O’Donnell heads a crew of diehard steelhead guides who love the Ronde and the steelhead it sustains. As much a spey casting and fishing school as a hard-charging guiding operation, this is the best place we know of to learn the art of spey casting and improve your swing fishing skills. Now offering two distinct options on different sections of the river, Speywater Lodge continues to improve and impress. Scott has deep roots in the sport stemming back to the 1980s and his time serving the Navy in Washington State. There he met another like-minded soul, Dec Hogan, and together they learned to steelhead fish and spey cast. Scott guided winter steelhead on the Sauk and Skagit for many years before relocating to the Northern Oregon coast to do more of the same. In the meantime, he spent more than 25 seasons guiding in Alaska, designed the very first Rio Skagit lines and enjoyed the pleasure and recognition of being a Sage-sponsored casting instructor. PAGE 86
It’s now been more than 20 years since Scott O’Donnell first laid eyes on the river that he would eventually call home. For much of that time Scott had a simple game plan: run multi-day float trips on the lower portion of the river in the early season and move the operation upriver to a rental house turned short-term lodge later in the season when temperatures dropped. Over time, Scott expanded his operation, and more importantly, he and his wife Stephanie fell more deeply in love with the Grande Ronde. In 2014, with the purchase of their own permanent Speywater Lodge facility, Scott and Stephanie are now proud to call the Grande Ronde home and share their love and knowledge of this river with their guests.
The River The Grande Ronde is a Snake River tributary and is considered one of the best late season steelhead rivers in the Pacific Northwest. Throughout the month of October, the Ronde is as good a dry fly and greased line fishery there is. The multi-day float trips start the last week of September and continue through the last week of October. These trips cover the lower portion of the river and take out very near the mouth where it flows into the Snake River. At the beginning of the month anglers can expect to fish with a floating line 75 percent of the time or more.
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