THE IRIDEUS - MARCH 2020
An Upper Sac Primer: Part 1 - Winter The Basics on doing well here By Michael Malekos
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fish the upper Sacramento River hard in the winter. The river is open to angling all year, after all. My wife’s family offers me the use of their weekend home in the town of McCloud. Each day, I rise early, pull on my waders, and proceed in darkness to different access points along the river’s northernmost sections. A favorite destination is the river accessed at the Cantara Loop. Whenever I fish there, I seldom come upon another angler. Perhaps because the memory of a part disaster lingers. In July 1991, a Southern Pacific Railroad train derailed at the Cantara Loop, where the tracks curve nearly 180 degrees at the bridge over the river, and a tanker car spilled metam sodium, a soil fumigant and herbicide that forms a toxic liquid and gas. Interstate 5 was closed, residents from the town of Dunsmuir and south to Castella were forced to evacuate, and both the fish and the insect populations of the upper Sacramento were decimated all the way down to Lake Shasta. Seasoned anglers I’ve spoken to who fished there before the accident remember this area as a good place to catch trout in the 10to-12 inch range. A 14-to-15 inch trout was an exceptional fish there. Today the river appears to have rebounded and has once again become quite
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a fishery. The area is scenic and provides easy access to excellent fishing opportunities. My guess is that if the anglers who fished here before returned, they’d find the trout living in this nutrient-rich water to be much larger than before. Additionally, similar to other fisheries that follow strict catch and release than before. As in other fisheries that follow strict catchand-release practices, upper Sac trout live longer, grow larger, and get smarter, and thus catching them becomes more technical, at times requiring fly fishers to fish smaller fly patterns. The trout I have caught and released here are vibrantly colored, healthy, and are incredibly strong fighters. One thing I have learned by fishing the upper Sac is that when bugs are coming off, an angler can be fishing and catching trout in a spot where the bugs are hatching while another angler, not far away, sees no insect activity and is not catching a thing. Snapshot: The Cantara Loop
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early three decades have passed since the derailment poisoned the river. The upper Sac at Cantara has relatively clear, clean, highly oxygenated water. The clarity, water level, and temperature are regulated by the amount of rainfall and weather conditions throughout the year. Like most freestone rivers, the shallow
