Middle Rogue Steelhead/Sea Run Cutthroat

[WillJ]

Have had the pleasure of catching at least 2 Cutts around TV on the Rogue this season. Had one on I'm sure was a cutt as well cause of the size and the coppery flash it made. They seem to like eggs. Last fish I caught there was a cutt a solid 16 inches.
Have a Fisheries biologist buddy here in Oregon that has done some work on anadromous fisheres and says the technology is there for tracking them, it's just not small enough attach to the outgoing smolts. Which makes sense if you think about it. It would have to be miniscule and also be able to be tracked over GREAT distances.
-w

[bubzilla]

No question about there being some very large cutts on the upper river. Just as an example, I landed two this year one day drifting from Rogue Elk to Shady during the salmon fly hatch on dries that were close to the 20" class. Couple years ago I got one out of car body while the flows were really low during prime-time winter season that was probably pushing 22". I'd have sworn it was a nice winter the way it tore me up, and we were all shockd when we saw it up close. The question wasn't whether they were cutts; the question is whether they were searun.

The science, as it's been explained to me, would suggest those fish were either residents or fluvial--that is, they either lived in the area full-time or they migrated in-basin from smaller tributaries back into the mainstem river, but they never went to the ocean. Lots of guys catch a big cutt on the Rogue and automatically assume it's searun; that's just not very realistic given the biology of Coastal cutts. All you can pretty much say that high up in the river is that you caught a cutt--everything else about its pedigree is pure speculation.

[WillJ]

I hear ya...
I'd like to think they were residents myself :)
Reflects a pretty healthy system.
Now if we could just get down around 2000cfs we could go chase em again!

[PatrickM]

Hey, Will. Nice to see you on the board.
I'd appreciate it it you make sure the Rogue is in fishable shape by the time I get up there. If you've been good, Santa may even bring you some flies.

[WillJ]

Yeah, well i haven't been to the river in over a week what with storm fronts, high water, family visits & common colds. So it's either start posting or fly casting for 4Runners in front of the house.
Will try to get out a few times this week, conditions permitting.
Weren't you on the Feather today?
-w

[jbird]

Heres another pretty little one from last winter. I got a few on dries this day. I subscribe to the fluvial theory.



To assume a cutt is searun just cause the river leads to the ocean is very spaculative...especially when you can get them pretty much year round and in every size range. Honestly, I dont care. they are a sweet treat when your eyes behold them.

I think if a guy were to set his heart on pursueing only cutthroat on the rogue, and did his/her homework and really made it a passion. There would be great rewards in it. The problem for me is, theres too many steelhead to distract me all the time. I believe a lot of the big cutts reside in the sloughey places, Where you normally wouldnt dream of fishing.

Jay

[ycflyfisher]

Nice fish guys! Not that it really matters, and I know we partially hashed this out on the Jefferson board a couple years ago, but according to ODFW biologists searuns don't go above the Illinois on the Rogue. What we have above the Illinois, according to the biologists, are fluvial cutts. They migrate but don't go to the sea. Who knows if they're right, but scale samples and calcium ratios don't usually lie. I've seen a guide who shall remain nameless claiming to have caught large searun cutts well into the upper river, and the chances of that, given what the biologists suggest, are extremely low.

P.S. Is there any consensus as to whether there are searun browns on the Trinity? Most of the anglers I've talked to think there are, and I've seen a couple pictures of fish that definitely looked like they might be--of course, that's not a very scientific or conclusive way to judge whether they were ever in the ocean or not.

According to the fish bios from the USFS that do all the monitoring of the various fishes on the Trinity, the browns are migratory but not anadramous. I think you've got to go back a decade or more before you get a year where they counted a single brown at the Willow Creek weir. Yet every year they count 200-350 browns at the Junction City weir which is higher in the watershed. Since the known anadramous fish in the basin, always have higher respective counts at the WC weir than the JC weir, the browns have a profile where a negligible percentage of the fish as using anadromy as a survival strategy.

From what I'm told, by a freind that actually targets the browns 10 months or so out of the year, the browns utilize the river environs much differently than the rest of the fishes. Most of the season the browns congregate over the large grass mats in the longer frogwater stretches. But some of them move into the riffles during the chinook egg drop just prior to their own spawning.

When I asked the biologist I know about "chromer" browns, he pointed out they tend to silver up when the water goes from crystal clear to somewhat turbid after a storm. He felt most of the fish that anglers are catching that appear to exhibit "sea run" visual characteristics, likely have totally freshwater lifehistories.

There has never been a scale analysis study that I'm aware of, to any in depth level on the browns in the Trinity.

I know that browns were initially introduced to the Trinity watershed at a decades defunct, hatchery that was operating in Willow Creek. Browns were also artificially propigated at the current hatchery decades ago, but that practice was discontinued(I'm assuming because the observable population dynamics indicated they were probably residualizing).

[bubzilla]

Wow, thanks ycflyfisher. Very informative post.

I had a very interesting conversation with a guy from the old Wild Salmon Center ten or eleven years ago at a sportsmen's show in Portland about the research they were doing on the Kamchatka with steelhead. Anyone remember those trips they did where you collected scale samples while fishing, and the big teaser was the tax writeoff for the trip as a result? Anyway, he explained that some of the things they'd learned about these fish was that they actually could, and frequently did, become searrun long after they were adults. We're talking trout that were several years old going to sea and then coming back on spawning runs as what we'd consider steelhead. Pretty cool. The gist was that we'd done a great deal of damage to the health of our steelhead fisheries with decades of overharvesting what everyone simply considered resident trout.