Spring.
June 8, 2007
The "Juneuary" rains have finally come. The grass is growing so fast that I can hear it. The rivers have gotten too low already and they have not yet responded to the slow, intermittent soaking rains of the past week. Summer Steelhead fly fishing on the Olympic Peninsula rivers has come to a momentary standstill this late may into june. The Spring Chinook salmon are hiding in the deeper holes now too. More rain is predicted over the next week, so maybe we will see a spike in flows in the Olympic Peninsula Rivers, enough to move some fish around, bringing them across the tidal river bars and into the runs. Perhaps even enough to swing a Spey fly. For now Im trying summer beach and steelhead flies.
We saw our first Summer Steelhead this year back in early April, while Winter Steelhead fly fishing in the Rainforest on the Lower Sol Duc River, the same day we had a flock of Sandhill Cranes fly overhead. We caught an over 30" male Wild Steelhead at the Brightwater House pool that day, just before a storm moved in for a week of rain and cold. The rivers went out again within a night, as they had done repeatedly all winter of 2006-2007. So much flooding, and so often, that it had cost me most of my scheduled Winter Steelhead fly fishing trips. The end of winter season came with a crescendo of wild fish on the fly on several trips in a row. You have to like peanut butter and jelly to make it out here as a fly fishing guide.
Between trips and during the extended high water breaks this winter I have been working on my fifty-plus-year-old Swampscott Dory. This has been an over one year long project of starts and stops; across several shop spaces, of fitting and trying, doing and undoing, and doing over again... and a whole lot of scraping and sanding. As a fellow Alaska Guide said to me one night after a particularly hard week at the Iliaska lodge - "Don't do the math".
The boat came from a friend who had stored it for nearly fifteen years in a barn out on Marrowstone Island. The Dory was in pretty bad shape. He told me it had been stored outside for years, on the ground and open to the weather- and this was before he rescued it and put it up indoors. The planks were split in places, the frames were broken and pieces were lost, some of the bent ribs were also broken or lost, the thwarts had been out of her for years. The false stem was entirely rotted out, the stemhead was simply gone. Many fasteners were missing or sprung. The outwhales and caps were splitted and mostly gone. She had no rudder or centerboard, though it was ovbvious that she did have these at one time. She had been a sailor for sure, with a mast step to boot.
Over the time she spent stored in the barn she had rested on a crooked pile of lumber upon her flat bottom. This had given her a slight twist in shape along her centerline. A pile of yard trash; boxed agricultural mixes, sprays, containers, dusts etc had developed inside of her, piled high above the gunwhales and completely obscuring the interior. There was also a ghastly collection of dessicated, dead rodent parts, expired bird remains and a shoal of insect bodies. I surmised that the poisons had done their worst over the nearly two decades of accumulation. And that this had probably saved the boat as well, from insects anyway. She was decidedly not seaworthy. I paid him a dollar for the boat. I thought it might take a month or two to get her in the water again. Then I got her off to the shop and up on the saw horses for a good cleaning and inspection.
It did not take long for me to realize that I had paid an eminently fair price for this boat. I decided to fully restore her.
In my research I learned, from reading John Gardner's works, that the boat had been patterned after a boat built at Mystic Seaport Museum. I was able to obtain the plans from the Seaport Museum at a reasonable fee. These boats were drawn from the same or similar plans as the Fred Dion Dory, which was an offshoot of the Gerry Eammons Dorys of the 19th century, from his boat shop in Massachussetts. This particular version is decidedly a working boat, not a fine gentleman's racer. She had always been painted throughout with no brightwork finishes. I believe that she was built in the Puget Sound region, or at least on the west coast- about fifty years ago- and she was made of local woods; Douglas Fir, Cedar etc. In studying Gardner's "The Dory Book", and other works, I was abe to determine the most appropriate materials to use in restoring this boat.
I tried to remain faithful to the working history of these boats. I made a few exceptions to original materials and methods, driven partly by time concerns- a restorer's fatal trap- and by practical considerations. The damage to some parts of the boat were not repairable. I opted to use West System Epoxy in most of the splitting repairs, along with some fiberglas tape and fabric in some other pieces, joints and places. I then replaced the entire bottom, the transom, the external stem, the false bottom, the frames and ribs, the knees and braces and thwarts, rails and caps, and all of the nearly 1000 copper fasteners and bronze screws. To date the only original parts of this boat are the 10 planks, the internal stem, and a few of the original stem nails. If there is one thing I have learned from this project it is that I hate epoxies.
The next (new) boat that I build myself will be similar to this one and I will use all of the old ways and materials, not epoxy. A properly fitted and fastened, calked, tarred and well painted traditional boat like this will remain seaworthy for decades. Once you get into the epoxy you are stuck with it. But with this particular project I fell prey to the siren song of expedience and economy, the promise of a quick fix. It was neither.
Somewhere in the middle of all of this I decided to name her "Hope".
Right now I am working on installing the frames. Quite a job as the whole proces is in reverse of the original construction methods, which would have had the frames as the internal skeleton of the boat, driving the shape etc. A huge problem in this restoration has been finding and maintaining some resemblence to the original shape of the boat amidships. Even before beginning the work she had lost some four to six inches of beam over the years. In the end I settled for about a fifty inch beam- more or less an inch or two. The planks are old enough and dry enough that forcing them into a wider beam would mean creating a pre-loaded stress in the planks on the frames etc. A recipe for splitting planks later under use. This leaves her well narrower, athwartships at the sheer than she was originally, perhaps by six to eight inches. I believe that she is fairly of original width at the waterline height.
If she goes well, with no serious problems this first year of use, I may decide to set her up for sailing again, and to use her for guiding fly fishermen on Puget Sound for Sea Run Coastal Cutthroat Trout, and of course for the charity trips that I do for a number of habitat and environmental causes here.
Sea Run Cutthroat fly fishing has been on and off all spring. The usual few here and few there routine. Some nifty fish around, including some over 18 inches. And we have hit a few Resident Coho too. We have been seeing great numbers of Sandlance, Herring, Surf Smelt, Chum Salmon Fry etc all spring. It is indeed a wonder that the fish bother with our flies at all. Little Stone's Chum Baby fly has been my most productive, go-to fly for the Sea Run Cutthroat Trout for several years since I originally developed it. (more on that later). I have to say that I have had the most fun on surface patterns; dry flies and skaters, wakers, muddlers but especially using Leland Myiwaki's Beach Popper on the Puget Sound Beaches.
This late spring is looking good with these softer cloudy days and light rains. It is refreshing and provides an angler some stealth in the softer light. Soon enough we will get into a few months of hot sun and dry air, and north winds- all of which mean we will not see any significant rains again here until sometime in October. This is one of the reasons that I guide fly fishermen on the Puget Sound and Hood Canal beaches all summer instead of trudging along on the nearly dry riverbeds of the west end rivers. In all fairness we do have some little spots out here in the hills that fish well in spring and summer, but especially later in the fall, for Trout and Salmon.
To my mind there is nothing else in fly fishing quite like watching Mt Ranier glowing a soft orange-red in the low sunset light of a summer night, the water growing slicker and darker as the winds die into dusk, and then having a wild Sea Run Cutthroat Trout slam your fly as it draws a slow swinging arc across the moving tides.
