A Journey: July 2012

Saturday, July 21, 2012

Fish Are Jumpin'

We're trying to take some of our free time to see some of the things around the area that we often ignore.

String was hearing that "Salmon Season" was about to start and he hadn't been to his old fishing spot in a few years, but he was thinking about doing a little fishing this year. He decided we should just go check it out on a day he didn't intend to fish so we could see if things were good. Off we went to the Oroville Dam on the Feather River... it was opening day.

Unfortunately String's favorite area (near the riffles) is no longer open to fishing. Apparently there is no fishing between the hatchery and the After bay. It's all posted. The places along the after bay, where people used to stand shoulder to shoulder, are totally off limits now.

(It did used to look so dangerous when they did that.)

But just beyond that there were the fishermen, braving the first day of the season to catch those wonderful salmon.

I was a tad disappointed that this one little place, where you could just set up a nice fishing spot (and didn't have to crawl down the bank) was included in the places where you couldn't fish. I've seen lots of women enjoy that little spot and thought that maybe this year I'd get to be lucky and spend a day there.

Not happening.

After we looked at all those areas we were familiar with I asked String if he'd ever seen the fish ladders and he said we never did make it up there. So off we went to the hatchery to check that out. I didn't mention that while the rest of the country was burning up in the 100 plus temperature range, we had beautiful low 80 (or so) degrees and lovely breezy weather.

We weren't sure there would be anything going on there, but we had time, and we were just poking around anyway. We were glad we did--it was fun to check it out.