A favorite regional hosted trip of mine is just a couple of hours over the hill from Ashland to a wonderful remote little tent camp on the Klamath river called Jefferson Flywater. This unique property sits just a few class V rapids downstream of the town of Happy Camp and would probably be considered on the middle river. I've done this trip twice in late September now and it's a very tough time to beat for weather but proving to be pretty unpredictable fishing.
I wasn't expecting a lot from the Klamath this year as the whole system is still recovering from some very tough low water/high temp years as well as poor ocean conditions which has really put most of the anadromous fish on the west coast in the red. Still, I was hoping we might be surprised by a couple good pods of fish here and there. Everyone in our group touched fish but with no real consistency to speak of. Still, I feel the setting is worth the price of admission.
For 3 days we fished one of the most remote parts of Northern California and most days we were the only boat on our beat.
We slept in heavy canvas tents in the cool mountain air, ate hearty, home cooked meals (dutch oven lasagna!) and ruminated on the fishing around a campfire every night. I think I will be a little gun shy for the same week in the future but I do think in a more normal/average year we would be fishing over twice as many fish easily. I look forward to seeing how the rest of this season shapes up.
A huge thank you to Stan, Willie, Jim, Joe, Ray and Scott for joining me down there with lots of laughs and great attitudes. I hope were able to fish together again someday. A hearty thank you goes out to our guides Paul, Alex, Keith and Mike who put us on prime water every day as well as to the outfitter Ryan Allred of Jefferson Flywater for running a top notch operation in the Nor Cal sticks. Also thank you to Fly Water Travel who takes so much of the guesswork out of putting a trip like this together.
