With most of the rivers in our Future Adventures list running high with this year’s extraordinary snowmelt, we here at T&S have had to get a little creative when it comes to scratching our fly fishing itch. Our solution has been to utterly eschew the bloated rivers to our north and east and instead head south for coastal creeks running to the pacific from the mountains of Monterey County.

Our first coastal stream target was the optimistically named Salmon Creek. At first the creek was nothing but a blue squiggle on a map that had been rumored to be a fine place to catch costal rainbows. When one knowledgeable Monterey Peninsula local was asked if it was worth the 90+ mile journey, he replied with a noncommittal “I won’t fish it until you do.” But with little other options, and the assurance that, if nothing else, we would have a nice hike to a waterfall we set out one spring morning down the twists and turns of highway one.

If salmon ever ran in Salmon Creek, then they didn’t have far to go. Less than a mile from the ocean, after hiking a few minutes through alders and laurel, Salmon Creek Falls make their more than 100 foot decent to the rocks below. Above the falls the creek is a series of plunge pools separated by short waterfalls less than a yard high. The hiking is steep, but fun, requiring lots of scrambling over boulders and at one point, a delicate shimmy along a 10 inch dirt shelf in the canyon wall 15 feet above a shallow pool.

To our surprise, these pools proved to be full of small spooky coastal rainbow trout. These fish, in the 4-8 inch range, would gladly rise to a small dry fly on the first or second cast, but if you failed to catch them on that rise, they would make you wait ten minutes before daring to rise again.

As we hiked further into canyon, we eventually caught and released more than a dozen of these little trout, and found that they were all covered with black spots and smudges, which at first we took to be some sort of adaptation to the local conditions. Eventually though, we were informed that these fish suffered from “Black Spot Disease” which is apparently caused by a parasite. Fortunately, according to our informant, the spots neither harmed the fish, nor anyone who thought it was a good idea to kill and eat a fish smaller than their hand.

Diseased or not, these spots gave these little fish an almost spectral beauty. Along the way we saw lots of evidence of previous wildfires (although I am told it was not touched in the 2008 fire that ravaged the north of the county), and the little spots seemed as if could have been smudges of ash from those fires. They weren’t camouflage, but they did seem to suit the environment

We hiked up to an almost perfectly round pool that was more than 20 yards in diameter, with a gravel bar extending to its center. It was easily the largest pool we had come to and appeared to be quite deep under the three-foot waterfall at its head. Unlike the pools we had had previously come to, this one had sheer cliffs on both side, and the waterfall offered no convenient rocks to help us over. We coaxed no fish from that pool, but it was one of the most beautiful places I had been in a while, and seemed a perfect place from which to turn back.

Next time… tiny rainbows and naked hippies on the Little Sur

--Posted by Eben