Heading out on an Oregon rod-trip

I was tying up a row of fey little mayfly patterns, with which I hoped to charm the trout of Montana’s fabled spring creeks, when I got an email from my pal Henry Hughes in Oregon entitled ‘The Intruder’. “These have been very effective on our fall, west-coast salmon,” wrote Henry under a picture of what looked like a dangerous nipple tassel. “The whole fly is about 7cm long and notice the hook has a stinger.” Clearly the esoteric part of my trip was going to happen east of the Rockies.

It was September. Hughes was on sabbatical and keen to repay me for shepherding him round the Fens the previous winter on the trail of a New Year pike. “Come on over,” he’d said. “We’ll make it an Oregon rod-trip. Smallmouth bass, salmon, blue-backs, crabs, maybe even a sturgeon. And don’t forget, dope is legal here.” An invitation it took me precisely one-10th of a second to accept. And not because of the dope. The spring creeks were merely a warm-up act that I had added just ahead