Salmon River - Fall Fishing Report (Week 13) 

Jay can you talk a little in detail how do you know when swinging flies if your head is heavy enough??

Thanks for the great report! I could not agree more about the fly zones I’ve been fishing used water to say the least but 6lb fluorocarbon tippet and small size 12 eggs has cleaned up a few fish for me under a float! I would love to see some tying tutorials on some classic wet flies you guys swing. Thank you for the video keep them coming!

Great report as usually Jay. Can you make a tying video featuring your 2 most productive stonefly nymphs?

Spot on as always jay! I was just out to the salmon river and folks were def hangin outta the trees more or less lol.. Luckily i got to fish the upper fly zone before it closed with my uncle. Caught a small steelhead up there and lost one giant chromer on a big dark pink globug egg. The lower fly had a better bite on day two. We got to our spot quite early and that helped some. Baby blue estaz eggs were workin pretty good as u said. But we also had bites on some rubber leg orange bead headed nymphs/stones. Lost more fish than we landed but was still nice to be out. Plan on doing atleast one more trip before christmas. Good luck out there man! Always look forward to yours and ricky's updates on either end. Fish on sir!!

Great video. Please keep them coming. Folks like us from NJ appreciate you. We hope to have you guide us sometime. Tight lines forever & Happy Holidays !!

Thanks Jay! Been doing really good at oak if you know where to look 😁

Greetings from warm sunny Costa Rica Jay.

As always thanks for the info. Suggestion: put some oil on that chair, you’re scaring the fish! You mentioned the hatchery holding a lot of fish. I fished 3 of 4 weeks, 2 day trips, 10/25- 11/17. At the 1st trip I would guess there were 10-15 steelhead in the fish ladder, 2nd trip probably 50-75 & on the 11/16-11/17 outing I would say at least 200 with maybe 100 salmon. I target the lower river (not douglaston) to avoid the crowds in Altmar & from what I saw it was another mediocre fall steelhead run, when compared to 10-15 years ago. So I got to thinking, what good does holding hundreds of steelhead in the hatchery over the winter, 4-5 months before spawn do? I’m pretty sure the hole idea of the fishery is to create economic activity and even with a douglaston pass you can’t fish in the hatchery! During the hatchery rebuild I witnessed a chain link fence across the hatchery creek mouth in august, not sure why that idea or better yet netting those fish and trucking them back to the estuary for them to run again. As the water temp drops most would probably hold in the pools all winter accessible to anglers. I’m pretty sure there’s a lot more food in the river during the winter than there is in the hatchery. On the way home I bumped into a guide who lives in Altmar & told him what I saw at the hatchery. He informed me that DEC no longer stocks Orwell or Trout brooks with steelhead, all are released from the hatchery so the fall runs accumulate there until the winter temps cause the fish to hole up in the river and that large numbers of fish wintering in the hatchery has been going on for years!