By Bill Monroe When the rod tip wiggles do you get the tickles? But alas! No drug-from-the-tug since Chinook fishing closed and coho crashed? All that boat and nowhere to launch? Go fish. Not out for trout or look for Chinook. Who gives a hoot for an old fall boot? Tickle, tug and drug are…
William Shakespeare an angler? He clearly understood frustration, although in his wildest dreams may not have been wont to imagine fishing’s vagaries in the 21st century. To this day, destiny is ahh, such cruel fate….
By Bill Monroe The term “Dead Zone” shows up more and more often these days as kind of an environmental slang term referring to areas where life and/or fauna activity are either non-existent or extraordinarily…
By Bill Monroe It’s Labor Day. This is my week to pass along thoughts, suggestions, interesting news and whatever how-when-where tos Buzz Ramsey happens to miss (yeah, right!). I intended to explain how astoundingly tough decisions are forced upon Oregon and Washington fish managers when they have to shut down salmon season on the Columbia…
By Bill Monroe It’s Labor Day. This is my week to pass along thoughts, suggestions, interesting news and whatever how-when-where tos Buzz Ramsey happens to miss (yeah, right!). I intended to explain how astoundingly tough…
By Bill Monroe Photo above: This 71-pounder was caught by a fly years ago in the Rogue River. Photo by Jim Carey. What’s with that that adipose do you suppose? There’s a quality fishing lodge…
Trey Carskadon and Randy Woolsey celebrate their double The boat was loaded for bear. Stacked against the competence of a 43-year-old fishing guide, Bill Monroe Jr., were six genarian-type old(er) guys with easily more than…
By Bill Monroe Photo above: Years ago, the late Bob Toman photographed this scene on the lower Deschutes River, when an ambitious smallmouth bass tried to steal a plug from the mouth of an agitated summer steelhead. Was it prophetic? I’m professionally descended from a century of outdoor writers for the Oregonian whose genesis…
By Bill Monroe All right all you Pro-Troll trolls – Stick this in your rod holder. Imagine hunting a tom turkey over a decoy and watching as he draws … ever. so.slowly … closer.Or maybe you’re bow hunting for elk and get a responding scream to your bugle as the bull silentlyslides into sight. There’s…
By Bill Monroe Some decades ago, I spent a pleasant spring morning with the late Bob Toman on the Clackamas River. We caught a couple of fish and returned to the shoreline below his home to clean the catch, saving some leftovers for “Hank,” a blue heron smart enough to realize Bob was his meal…
OREGON CITY – After years of frustration and the near-extinction of Willamette River wild winter steelhead, Oregon biologists believe they’ve cleared a major hurdle in the problematic control of sea lions at Willamette Falls. And it’s not just the reduction in numbers, from 46 feeding on steelhead and salmon at the falls in 2018 to…
Many years ago in a land not too far away, a white-collar worker in a tie and a small yellow kayak caught a spring Chinook beneath the Sellwood Bridge on his lunch hour. I was still a relatively new arrival at The Oregonian (July 1981) and immediately chased down the details of a man they…