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 Pocket Water!” exclaimed my buddy, Tom, as he pulled the pickup onto a turnout in the deep woods. From his obvious excitement, he thought this was a great fishing opportunity. He swung open his door and his Border collie, Sunny, flew out into the forest.
Now I had heard that expression before, but I wasn’t all that clear as to what it meant. The streams we usually fished had runs and rapids and pools. I asked Tom what was different about this destination.
He said, “Pocket water is found where the river runs through a bunch of big rocks and boulders. The river channel is often split into two or more flows that work through the big rocks, forming small pockets of water where fish can hold. You can fish two or three different pockets in the same width of the river.” Tom’s explanation proved to be pretty precise.
We followed Sunny down a narrow trail, through some lovely old-growth spruce, to the bottom of the canyon. At that stage of its flow, the river was a typical meandering stream with gravel beds and undistinguished features. We easily waded across a shallow pool and worked up the far bank, where we found a gravel logging road. The road was dressed in full “new green” with wonderful deer fern and sword fern, bedded with lush miner’s lettuce. As we hiked down the road, it steepened visibly.
Slippery Rocks
 Tom stopped next to a huge streamside spruce, its trunk shaped like a pistol grip as it fought to stay sunward on a steep bank. “This is the spot we put in,” he announced with a smile. “Be careful, those rocks are much slicker than they look.”
As if to illustrate her master’s advice, Sunny easily dropped down the vertical bank, splashed through some standing water and jumped up on a huge flat rock. When she landed, her four, usually stable, feet flew out to her side and she slid, paws first, into the pool!
This was not great news. I’d been on a lot of trips with Sunny, and she was as surefooted as a mountain goat. I had best be careful. It took a few minutes for Tom and me just to get down the 20-foot bank to the riverbed. Not only was it almost a vertical drop, but most of the “grab-on” foliage was salmonberry and devil’s club, (an awful, yet beautiful, plant that looks like rhubarb on steroids with stickers). A good grip on either plant would lead to hours of needlework to remove the stickers.
Finally getting to the bottom, Tom moved gingerly upstream, leaving me some really nice holes out among the sloping, slippery, rock pile. Very carefully I threaded on a nice parachute Adams fly, and opened my vest and took out one of my bottles of goop that keeps the fly from sinking. I pulled some line from my reel and took a step toward the nearest pool to make my cast. The next thing I knew, I was flying forward, face first. My foot had found no traction and I was out in space. In one of the dumber reflexes every clumsy angler develops, my first instinct was to protect my rod, and I flicked it gently into the bushes just before I bounced off several really hard surfaces.
As most of us in our mid-sixties must do, I took an inventory of parts as I fought for a little breath. Once assured that no major bone groups were broken, I managed to get upright, and go back to work. The pockets were wonderful, fun to cast toward, and interesting to work. The water flowed through the boulders at a lot of angles, leading to many possible hiding spots for the feeding trout.
Tough to Control
 With so many little pockets, it took awhile to cover most of the water. I did manage to hook and release a couple of pretty five-inch cutthroat, and had a bunch of misses. Keeping in touch with the line as it lies draped over rocks and ledges made controlling the fly pretty tricky.
After awhile I decided to try a different lure and put on a little elk hair caddis. I reached for my float goop and found that vest pocket disturbingly empty. While I was too busy to notice at the time, the force of my fall had sent at least three bottles and jars flying into the rocks. A crawl-around search produced no results, so I’d have to borrow some from Tom.
Hiking upstream was out of the question. Tom had managed it, but the agile retired forester had a few advantages over me. First, his center of gravity was a foot lower, and he weighed about a third less. Finally, as a former hurdler, he was a lot more coordinated than this old shot putter! So I headed back up the bank, grabbing onto whatever had the least stickers.
When I was halfway up, Sunny made an appearance. While she usually stays with Tom, she always checks on me from time to time. As I pulled myself over three horizontal vine maple branches onto the logging road, Sunny leaped up to follow. She could have easily gone under the brush to the road, but she trusted my trail blazing and found herself hanging from her front paws, high in the air! Luckily she was just within reach and I was able to pull her up to the road beside me.
Challenging Spot
The two of us hiked up the path to where Tom was walking, searching for my body down on the rocks! I borrowed some float liquid for my drowned fly, and tried a few new spots. A floating caddis worked much more effectively than a sunken one, and a couple of hours of casting netted me better than a dozen fish to play and double that amount of hits. Casting under a canopy of overhanging maple and around the boulders was a great challenge, but the water and the brightly marked native cutthroat were nothing short of breathtaking.
Naturally, I did manage to crash a few more times, twice on the stream and twice in the woods going back and forth from the logging road. I’ve long ago found that the average limb or fallen tree has a breaking point of about two hundred pounds. Just when I trust it and put on my full weight on one foot, it gives way under me, throwing me into the devil’s club, or onto some nice soft rocks.
Finally we worked our way out of the canyon and headed back to the truck. I found a generous collection of oyster mushrooms clinging to a dead alder so we’d have something to cook up for dinner. Tom had, as usual, outfished me pretty well, so he was happy, and I was grateful to have made it out alive. Pocket water was a wonderful place to fish, but I had a feeling that when I woke up the next morning, my body was going to file a formal complaint!
Bob Ellsberg’s column, Fishin’, appears monthly in RV Life and at rvlife.com.
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