Subsistence Fishing

Randy and I loaded up the Quad and the quad trailer that I got last year just for this purpose, with a bit more than it could hold, for our fishing trip. As you can see it also included a picnic table to assist with the fish cleaning.

Since we intended to spend a couple of nights, and I don't suffer well, we loaded the trailer with almost every thing we would need. I did forget worms, but they were really not needed at all. We catch Bass on small Panther Martin lures, and Catfish on trash fish. For our food, we took 2 cans of stew, 2 cans of beans, 2 cans of peaches, 5 polish sausages, oil, flour, spices, and two frying pans. We only used one of them. I forgot some potatoes as well. We dined well, with fish for the main course, and homemade canned peaches from Pat Brewster served as a great desert. We took only water (frozen) and coffee to drink, and a water filter pump to purify river water for coffee and to drink. We brought the beans back.

Its a fair trek to get to this spot, so the only possible visitor down there was a possible BLM employee to spray noxious weeds. The last mile or so requires either a quad or walking to get there.

Randy is helping to gather bait and keeping some of the big Bass that he catches to fill his limit of Bass. The limit is 5, which seems a bit silly, since the river is plagued with truly small, Small mouth. Its not hard to catch a limit in nothing flat. I managed to catch a 11 inch or so trout that apparently had not heard that the river is too warm for trout.

Soon we were into the Catfish and this size seemed to be the upper end of the average, although we did catch a few bigger. Randy had one that he wanted a picture of, that managed to get off the stringer before that happened. The cats spin and constantly twist anything that you put them on, and this one managed to untie a granny knot. He took three others with him when he made his break. We also lost a few others that broke a "chain stringer".

The little plastic table set in the river provided about as comfortable a spot to clean fish as I have ever experienced. Normally cleaning a catch of fish has my fun meter pretty well pegged, but this worked out really well. We did set up a production line however, I skinned and Randy filleted them.

Our first day was pretty hot, ( high 90's ) and we drank a lot of water, and used a lot of sunscreen. That evening, after cleaning the last of the fish for the day, we gratefully went into the river to wash some of the grime and sunscreen off our bodies. There is a nice sandy bottom that goes out to about shoulder high in the water.

The next morning we discovered that a visitor had crawled up on our beach to die. A baby Muskrat, wet from the river and with sand in his fur had crawled up behind my tent. Not sure what happened to him, he was just barely alive, but showed no visible marks. We surmised that he might have been a victim of a Rattle snake bite, but being an unknown rodent with an unknown problem we did handle it at all.

The morning was cloudy, and since the weather forecast had called for 30 percent chance of thunder storms, we were prepared for some bad weather. We were not disappointed when thunder and lightning started popping above our heads. When the flash and sound are simultaneous you know you are right in the middle of the storm. We took refuge in our tents to wait out the storm.

Enlarge this picture and you can see the rain just pouring down. It rained hard for about 15 minutes and then the storm moved on to cover another 30 percent of the landscape.

It didn't seem to hurt the fishing at all, and we cleaned a lot of fish that day. In the afternoon we walked upriver to try for some bass. The Bass were biting on almost every cast and we caught and released fish for at least a couple of hours, keeping only the bigger ones.

We finished cleaning our Bass as dusk settled into the Canyon. We took our baths and again retired after the evening show of Night Hawks, Swallows, Vaux Swifts, and Bats hawking bugs. The only man made sounds we heard were two planes.  The rest were sounds of the bird that inhabit the river, as well as Quail, Pheasants and Chukar.

The next morning we packed before the heat got too bad, and made our way out of the canyon. Along the way we ran across this denizen of the Oregon Desert. The ones here are really quite large compared to other populations in the Great Basin.

 As you can tell they have great camouflage. Click on the picture and enlarge it enough so that you can see him.

They say that they bleed from the eyes when distressed. Apparently he wasn't that concerned about being handled.

Randy did quite well as far as winter food was concerned. He left this morning with 26 pounds of Catfish fillets, and enough memories of the High Desert to perhaps last him another year.