15 minute read
THE LONG ROD & THE DOUBLE BARREL
Tenkara fishing for bass and hunting chukar in Southeast Oregon.
By Rob Lyon
Iwas traversing the shoulder of the canyon slope across from camp and heading down to the springs when I heard two shots and stopped in my tracks.
That would be Steve working back down from the palisades. I hunkered in the sagebrush and scanned the horizon for birds.
“Incoming!” squawked my radio a moment later.
A long shot, of course, but you never knew when you might get lucky.
They came at a snappy glide, a flock of eight to 10 chukar, and landed just over the brow of the flank ahead. I hustled forward, keeping low. Odds were good they would leg it back uphill.
Sure enough, I spotted the lead bird at the same time he spotted me. He launched low and I got one shot off, nicking the top of the brush and hitting him square with a load of 6s, dropping him head over tail.
“Roger that my friend, see you at the springs!”
Way down in extreme Southeast Oregon is a series of small streams that form a big playground for Northwest sportsmen. The Owyhee River and its three forks are home to plentiful chukar hunting and smallmouth bass fishing opportunities. (STEVE THOMSEN)
The Owyhee is a long way from anywhere, and its upper end is even more remote. You’ll want to go well-prepared just in case this rugged landscape puts some holes in your plans. (STEVE THOMSEN)
WE’D BEEN IN Southeast Oregon’s Owyhee River Canyon for the better part of a week hunting chukar and fly fishing for smallmouth bass. It was late fall and we had the place to ourselves. The river was running low and beautiful. We were upriver from Three Forks, where the major tributaries conjoined. While chukar involved a major effort at midday, fishing was how we relaxed at either end.
As for fishing, I’d brought a tenkara rod along. If this is the first you’ve heard of it, it’s becoming a thing in the US. The idea originated in Japan more than 400 years ago when fishermen on the mountain streams found it an effective method of catching the local fish. Since then it has taken on quite a following here in the States.
The idea is simplicity itself and harkens back to Tom Sawyer and his willow pole. A tenkara rod has no reel, you see, simply a fixed length of line. Instead of wearing out a fish with reel drag, a long, willowy rod is used. If you’ve ever thrilled at watching the pulse and dart of your rod with a fish at the other end, you’ll like this. Your average tenkara rod is 12 feet long and takes pulse and dart to a whole new level!
Tenkara is best practiced on smaller waterbodies such as creeks and streams. The Owyhee, in the foothills above Three Forks, is ideal for tenkara fishing in the lower flows of autumn.
Running through the remote high desert of the Owyhee Mountains, a land of rock and sand, sagebrush and juniper, and miniature, mauvecolored canyons, the allure is as much the natural majesty and the solitude as it is the fishing and upland hunting. The stream where we were encamped rolls along at a gentle 75 cubic feet per second and the cool currents are a pleasure to wade in warm, Indian summer weather.
LATE LAST FALL, we had left the San Juan Islands looking to get high into the watershed, well above Owyhee Reservoir and its popular tailwater brown trout fishery. I spoke with Tim Davis, executive director of Friends of the Owyhee, just before we left the islands. Davis grew up in the area and was a gold mine of intel on finding the right tracks to get us where we wanted to go. And I spoke with Ray Perkins, a former Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife regional manager, who dialed us in on the upper Owyhee fishery.
The high desert wilderness of the Owyhee River region is huge, stretching over 260,000 acres and comprising parts of Nevada, Idaho and Oregon. The plan was to travel south to where three primary tributaries form up into the mainstem Owyhee at a place called Three Forks. From there we would follow the sole grade leading off into the hinterland.
We had run the mainstream Owyhee in kayaks and canoes from Rome to Lesley Gulch on three separate occasions. Flowing at 150 cfs then, the river was a pleasure to fish, but we wanted even more rarified and miniaturized conditions, such that I considered to be ideal for tenkara work.
We also hoped to find the stream of our dreams to float next season: In other words, something absolutely pristine, smaller in scale and pretty much at the limit of what is (by our definition, at least) floatable at überlow water levels. Boaters float the tributaries well into the Nevada come spring, but the cool, wet days and muddy, rushing water held zero appeal for us. Not to mention, the upland season was still half a year away!
Once you know where you’re going and have it dialed in on your GPS, there is still the matter of execution. Getting down to riverside, or even driving on the red clay dirt roads that blanket the region, can be a driver’s worst nightmare. The soil is a slippery agglutinate that will have you out of commission in a heartbeat when wet. Travel prepared in a relevant rig with high clearance, tow rope, jack, shovel, chains, etc. Even in bone-dry weather you’ll have challenging road conditions from the myriad ruts and rocks and steep fourwheel-drive conditions. We drove the toughest offroad rig we could get our
The tents of author Rob Lyon and his fishing and hunting partner’s camp dapple a riverside bar near Three Forks, not far from the Idaho state line. (STEVE THOMSEN)
hands on to attempt the steep, hellbaked grades and tracks leading into remote areas of the watershed. At one particularly dicey drop we came upon a not-so-old pickup abandoned beside the track. We joked about the wife’s reaction when he returned home sans rig. WE ARRIVED IN good order with tenkara gear, fly rods and a couple of double-barrel 28-gauge Rugers. There are better populations of birds in the Owyhee Canyons than any of us had ever seen in other Northwest river canyons and we had hunted them all. We like to eat locally on these river trips, off what we can catch or shoot, and between panfried bass fillets and Dutch-oven chukar, we did eat very well.
One of the reasons we prefer the tribs to the mainstem is the scale of the experience. Downriver you have twice the flow of upriver and even that is considered extreme low flow for boating. What that means to the fisherman is that while you can wade in much of the mainstem section of the O, you can wade up the middle of the upper water in the upper canyon and fish to both sides.
The tenkara concept is a clean, easyflowing style in optimum conditions. For me, it’s an extension of a style I developed guiding summer steelhead fishermen on the Deschutes. I even developed a cast I called the Tilt Cast to obviate the need to false cast and to keep the fly in the water, where it has a better chance of being eaten by a fish. I fished a short length of line on a one-hand rod and carried a wading staff in the other. After a shot of espresso before heading out, I was what we call a greyhound for the next three or four hours. Movement was everything, as the more water you covered, the more likely you were to find steelhead. I fish tenkara on the Owyhee similarly, wading steadily upriver and making exploratory casts as I go.
SOLAR CHILL
Fishing and hunting partner Steve Thomsen and I have brought along several types of, I’ll call it, e-gear on recent trips. E-conveyances, to be precise, as in e-bikes and e-kayaks. This time it was an e-cooler by GoSun. Works slick. No ice, more room, no soaked stuff. Steve had the solar panels along and we could have lasted indefinitely. Good idea for these desert spaces. –RL
Lyon tries his hand at tenkara, a style of fly fishing based on a Japanese tradition that shines in smaller waters and does not employ a reel. For the author, the simplicity of using only a rod, line and fly is a strong draw. (STEVE THOMSEN)
Tenkara defines simplicity and is ideal for the active angler. Not only because he is less encumbered with equipment, but because he must move around by necessity to reach fish lies beyond the length of his fixed line. I run a line that stretches no further than from the tip of the rod to my hand with my arm outstretched. That way the casting is easy and when I swing a fish to hand it is an act of grace. No hand lining the last bit or, God forbid, dragging a flopping fish up onto the bank.
While tenkara fishing is largely a throwback to a simpler concept and less sophisticated equipment, it has merit in the modern world of fishing. I can see the value and the elegance of dealing straight up with rod line and fly and no mechanical devices. When our frontal cortex has fewer things to deal with, it can begin to relax. The business of constantly winding in and pulling out line from a reel, while it is a marvelous practical invention, can interfere with our simple presence on the water. Tenkara fishing utilizes only two tools. Add the reel and it increases by a third and is one more thing to deal with. If I can be on the water feeling deeply linked in to the stream, the water and the fish – and if I’m lucky, the tug of a fish – I’m good. And if I can keep my chronically busy mind out of the picture, better still. Then it becomes more like the state of being that Zen doctrine calls positive samadhi, wherein man and action are one. The world needs more of that.
For more on this style of fishing, see both dragontailtenkara.com and tenkarausa.com.
Come fall and the water is low, the best holes are scattered and will take some hiking and wading up and down and across the water to find them. In good weather you can wade wet, ideal for a mix of hiking and wading that the canyon will require. We bring an inflatable kayak to cross back and forth. You can wade across a few places on the mainstem O, but above Three Forks it is the norm.
Don’t waste time waving your fly over shallow fishless water. Bass are an ambush fish. Look for structure such as cattails, reeds, rocks and undercut banks. They are also a warmwater fish and if the nights have been below freezing, which they typically are in fall at this altitude, try your luck near any of the warm or hot springs situated along the river bank. We found our biggest fish there.
WHILE THE RIVER is loaded with bass, they do tend to put the small in smallmouth. I prefer to reference fish by weight rather than length and I’d say the average fish we caught
Tenkara is an effective way to fish, but it’s not for everyone. Not being able to cast as far as he is used to, more tangles with bankside brush and the balance of the rod itself are drawbacks for Lyon, here showing off a nice
Just as imported bass have taken to the Owyhee Canyonlands, so too has the Central Asian red-legged partridge known as chukar, providing a challenging game bird to pursue in fall. (STEVE THOMSEN)
was between 1/3 to, say, 2/3 pound. I spoke with Perkins, the former ODFW fisheries biologist, about this. He worked for many years in this region and told me the smallies were introduced in the mid-1970s.
“What I think we have in the Owyhee is a population dominated by younger-age fish. Once they spawn at about 10 to 12 inches, they have a very low survival rate,” he says.
That said, Perkins told me of the 3- and 4-pound fish they’d caught in some of the deeper slots in the canyon – after they’d gotten under the school of smaller fish, he was quick to add.
“I don’t think the river system upstream of the reservoir can support an abundant population of large smallmouth,” Perkins says. “Habitat conditions in the river are severe, from a smallmouth bass perspective.Flows are variable, with spring flows high and powerful some years for long periods of time. Summer flows are low and warm, but the growing season is short. Growth is slow; a 12-inch smallmouth in the reservoir is 4 years old and a 14-inch smallmouth is 5 years old. River growth rates are probably very similar.Forage needs for a large population of smallmouth are not met in the Owyhee River. When one looks at the heart of smallmouth country, there are 76 species of cyprinids alone present in Tennessee streams compared to the five species present in the Owyhee River.”
Without that minnow population to forage on, the bass must cannibalize to support a meager diet of insects, crayfish and terrestrials.
If you see a hatch coming off the water, be sure to check it out. As insects and invertebrates make up the bulk of their diet, you will likely find smallies working those bugs, just as if you were trout fishing.
Finally, toward a balanced view of tenkara fishing, there are a few things I don’t like. The inability to shoot line is one (ever a fan of all things ballistic). Two, even with a very short line such as I fish, with the extreme of the rod tip (there is a reason they sell these rods with two tips) the line and tip are easy to get caught in brush when I hike with it. Third, the lack of a reel makes it uncomfortably tipheavy after a while.
By way of a parting shot, I once fished summer steelhead on the Deschutes with a tenkara rod and when I finally hooked up, the effect was memorable! The fight played out in three riotous seconds before the fish thrashed free and was the proverbial tiger by the tail! NS
TOBY’S DUTCH OVEN CHUKAR
Stuff jalapeño in the breast cavity of your bird, wrap in bacon and season with lots of garlic cloves, salt, pepper and butter. Splash in some ale and cook about 45 minutes. Enjoy! –RL
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