The rain is here

After a couple days of more constant and harder rains this week, rivers are on the rise.  No, don't worry you silly Colorado people.  Rivers rising here in Oregon do not mean chocolate milk and unfishable conditions.  This is something I have had to learn over the past year.  Instead, what it means is that the steelhead or salmon, depending on the season, push up into the rivers.

This increase is a little late and normally (as if I would know having lived here for a whole 2 years) the fall salmon would already be in the rivers.  And late November would be when the winter steelhead begin their push upriver to spawn.

So the question that remains is what will be hidden in the dark depths of the rivers?  Will it be a nice Coho, or a Chinook, or perhaps a steelhead?  Does it even matter?  Probably not.  They are all big.  They are all serious fighters.  They are all hard to catch/land.  And I know little to nothing about chasing them.

So the final question remains, where do I fish this weekend???

FYI, the graphs on the right are of the levels of a few random rivers over the past month.  The blue is the actual level and the green is the historical average.