Right about this time last year, we ran an article called The Dean is Back. After several years at BC West that were solid by normal standards but slow by Dean standards, 2010 marked a return to ‘typical’ fishing for the Dean – that is, large numbers of insane steelhead and king salmon.
Today we’re here to tell you that in 2011, the party continued! We finished our season up a couple of weeks ago, and it was another year of stellar returns.
Some Things That Happened in 2011
Steelhead were caught in large numbers. Chinook salmon were caught on dry flies. Many Skagit heads were lost. Many fish won the battle with their angler. Many anglers won the battle with their fish.
High water early in the season made it very difficult for fish to ascend the canyon. That made for slow fishing on the Upper Dean through about mid-July…but all of those fish were stacked up in the Lower River! Though the first half of July, the Lower Dean produced some truly epic days. Your fearless editor removed the numbers from more than one fishing report – the actual catch stats were borderline believable.
In the latter half of July, the water dropped and the Upper River / Lower River fishing evened out a lot. By the back half of August, the river had shaped up such that we had a bunch of days on which dry line presentations out-fished all others. Gotta love it!
More on This Year’s Fishing at BC West
We post fishing reports for each week of our season. You can check out our 2011 BC West Reports right here – click the links in the left sidebar for any week you like.
We also posted a bunch of photos to an album on Facebook dedicated to 2011 at BC West.
Fish the Dean in 2012
History tells us that this trend is likely to continue for the next few years. Most of our 2012 weeks are sold out but we have some openings in the earlier and later parts of our season. Drop us a line if you’d like to experience the finest steelhead and Chinook fishery on the planet in rare form.
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