Western Washington University Oral History Program Program

 

This interview was conducted with Russ Willis circa 1992. The interviewer is Danny Beatty.

RW: [In] 1947 my partner and I decided to put boats on Pass Lake. We were interested in possibly working toward a resort. At that time, there were very few people who had any boats. It was a rare exception if anyone had a boat so we started negotiating with the Heilmans out at Pass Lake to get some of the property because they owned all the property other than what was in the state park. We were unable to get them to sell us any property although we offered them what we thought at the time was a substantial amount, which was ten thousand dollars for a thousand feet of frontage here. We asked to get it from the road where you first hit the lake there, from the highway coming from Anacortes, a thousand feet of that frontage. But as it turned out, they gave us a three-year lease, on property down around the old pump house and that’s where we put in our boats. We put, originally, twenty 11-foot cedar row boats down there.

 

DB: You know if any of those are left anywhere?

 

RW: Well, it’s possible that there [are] still some of the boats over on the Heilman property because they ended up there, after our three-year lease. We sold the boats to [Clare] and Amelia Heilman and they had the boats over there in conjunction with their farm.  I don’t know what happened to them but there’s possibility there are some of the old boats still kicking around.

 

DB: Ok, now your partner was Duane Genung?

 

RW: That’s right, Duane Genung.  He was a stockholder down at the plywood plant, same as I was. He was on one shift and I was on the other so that there was one of us always out there at the lake during the fishing season.

 

DB: So when did you run it mostly -- April through September?

 

RW: Yes, at that time just the fishing season, I think, went through probably up to the first of October.

 

DB: At that time it was a regular season.

 

RW: It was a regular season, yes; it was a lowland lake season that they started out with. Now as best I can remember, I came out of the Navy the last part of 1945, and in 1946, I believe the lake had been poisoned out and I think it had been planted.  I think it was a two-year hiatus that the lake laid dormant there while those fish grew to legal size, because I think they’d put them in as fry, not fingerlings.  I don’t know what strain of cutthroat they were, but they were a cutthroat. And that’s what we had in the lake there for the first few years.

 

DB: No rainbow at that time.

 

RW: No rainbow. It was strictly—it was poisoned out and cutthroat were put in there. There was a big argument over that, some liked it, and some didn’t. But I found myself that the cutthroat was a little better surface feeder than the rainbows. At that time, we did most of our fly fishing either on the surface or just under the surface, so I think it worked to the advantage of us that were fishing that way with the cutthroats because they used to rise pretty well.

 

DB: How long was it that you had the boat rental, three years?

 

RW: We had a three-year lease.

 

DB: Then it was over with?

 

RW: It was over, yes, as far as we were concerned, it was over with. The boats then moved away from the pump house, at the end of the field, you know the field runs down there from the road down to the lake. And there was a pump house right down at the end.

 

DB: So the last season you had this boat rental was 1950?

 

RW: Yes.

 

DB: So you had it until October of 1950, approximately?

 

RW: Approximately; that’s right.

 

DB: Do you have any recollection as to what you charged a day? Or how you worked that?

 

RW: Yes, that was interesting. We started out, if they rented the boat before noon we charged them 2 dollars a day and if it was after noon, it was a dollar. We kept our fishing tackle out there in the pump house, both Duane Genung and I.  We probably fished every day, some time, during the day during the entire season, because one or the other of us was out there, either in the morning or in the evening.

 

DB: Now when you talk about the pump house that was an irrigation system, wasn’t it, which Heilman had?

 

RW: That’s right. He irrigated up there on the pasture land.

 

DB: And he took the water out of the lake and pumped up to the higher ground?

 

RW: Higher elevation, yes. He was running stock out there, quality Hereford, registered Hereford.

 

DB: Who built the boats for you, do you remember?

 

RW: Yes, my nephew, George Shipley from Lyman. Seems to me, we contracted with him and he built them, I think for forty dollars a boat.

 

DB: And you furnished boat oars for the—?

 

RW: Yes; of course I don’t know whether there was a restriction at that time on motors on the lake, but nobody had motors at that time anyway. It was all strictly propelled by oars.

 

DB: How did the people get down to that area? Was there a road there?

 

RW: Well, there was a road that came down.  It wasn’t the best road in the world, but there was a road that turned off to the right before you got to the lake. Just before you got to the lake down there in the park, there was a road that turned off I think it was a logging road that Heilman—see Heilman had done selective logging in his area. In fact, he was one of the first people I know that practiced selective logging; who went in and picked out the old growth trees and left the younger ones.  He had a saw mill. Did you know he had a mill out there? Yes, he did rough cutting. In fact, my brother Ralph and I had him provide us with some rough cut timber that Ralph used in his lumber mill over at Sedro-Woolley and planed and resurfaced.

 

DB: Did you build a dock out from—?

 

RW: Yes, Duane and I built a small dock and had that so we could tie the boats up to it. And we’d have the boats—most the time they were lined up on both sides of the dock there. And if you came out there and if either Duane or I wasn’t there, why you just helped yourself and went out, fishing. When we came in, why, we would row out on the lake and collect the money.

 

DB:  Building your own dock on a lake is a far cry from what you dare do today, isn’t it?

 

RW: Yes, that’s right.

 

DB: Is there anything else about the three years that you spent, what, approximately, five months every year out there? Anything other than what you told me that you remember?

 

RW: Well then, in reflecting back on the fishing, I think practically everybody that fished the lake was in the process of learning because there wasn’t much information out, or available on lake fishing.  I was trying to think back this morning, of some of the fly patterns. Basically we used the old conventional wet fly patterns that were standard throughout the whole United States. One of the patterns I used quite a bit was the Professor. Most fly tiers are acquainted with that, it’s a simple pattern; and of course the Royal Coachman, and the Coachman, and the Brown Hackle and the Grey Hackle. But probably the two patterns that were used primarily in the lake was Al Knudson’s Yellow Spider and the Carey Special, in the various forms it was tied. I think one of them, wasn’t it the Carey Special, they called it Needle Nymph? Are you acquainted with that?

 

DB: No.

 

RW: They tied one I think they called it Needle Nymph that was a take-off from the Carey Special. But in those days we had the old silk fly line and that’s all we had available, either level or double taper. A little later on I think, probably in the early Fifties, they came out with the forward taper. But the old silk line sank if you wanted it to float and floated if you wanted it to sink, so you were fighting your line all the time.

 

DB: Constantly dressing it or undressing it, as the case may be.

 

RW: And of course what you had to do immediately after finishing fishing is you had to make sure you took that off the reel and got it dried. You didn’t leave it on the reel. And if you were going to plan to dry fly fish on the surface at all, you had to get that line dried and get it coated with some sort of floatant. Let’s see, what was that floatant that we used to get? It slips my mind but—

 

DB: Was it commercially prepared or was something that you concocted.

 

RW: Well, the fly line floatant, there was one that sold commercially; I think it came from England. But what I used for my dry fly preparation was paraffin dissolved in lighter fluid. You’d keep a little vile of that and of course the paraffin would dissolve in the lighter fluid and you’d dip that in there and you’d get a thin coating of paraffin on your fly and of course the lighter fluid then would evaporate and your fly would float pretty good.

 

DB: Oh this was for the fly, not the line.

 

RW: Yes; this is for the fly. Of course you had to keep that floatant close to your body so that it wouldn’t congeal. If it got a little cold, why, the wax would congeal in there.

 

DB: Oh dear.

 

RW: But it worked pretty fair.

 

DB: What about rods? That was about the time when fiberglass was coming around and cane rods were still in use and, of course, cane was the main—

 

RW: The cane rod still was the rod of choice. In fact, I can’t remember when the first fiber glass rod came out, but it seems to me that was in the Fifties some time. But everyone had some type of bamboo rod. I remember the first rod that I bought after I come out of the service in 1946 was I believe a Heddon Black Beauty. And it was, I think, an eight and a half foot rod and it threw a “C” belly.

 

DB: Which would compare to about a seven weight now?

 

RW: About a seven weight, a six or seven weight. And of course a lot of fellows aren’t acquainted with the old definitions of lines that were in the alphabet. But they ran from A on clear up to E. Going from A as the heaviest line down to E, the lightest.

 

DB: So the C would be like an HCH or a—

 

RW: HCH, yes.

 

DB: I remember that; but you usually gave it the name from the heaviest part of the line in the double taper.

 

RW: That’s right.

 

DB: Was this the first fly rod you ever bought, or just the first one after the war?

 

RW: No, I had a rod that I bought from Montgomery Ward in high school, in 1936, I think. I think it was, oh what’s the name of that? It’s a French name, French-Canadian name.

 

DB: I don’t know.

 

RW: I’ll have to think about it, but there was another rod that I had.

 

DB: But the Heddon Black Beauty was a quality rod at the time.

 

RW: It was a pretty good rod.

 

DB: It would be a collector’s item, now.

 

RW: Oh yes. I have several bamboo rods now that will be collector’s rods I think.

 

DB: Do you still have this one?

 

RW: Unfortunately, I backed up over it at Pass Lake and busted the tip on it and I couldn’t get it repaired and somewhere in the history it disappeared, I don’t know what happened to it.

 

DB: Last night I was looking at some new Orvis cane rods in their catalog and they ranged from $750 to $1550.

 

RW: I have a Phillipson rod that I bought during the time we were at the Pass Lake boathouse there, when we had the boats. And I bought it, it’s a Paramount. It’s a seven and a half foot rod, three ounce.  I paid fifty dollars for it.  I still have it; I need to have it refinished, because I made a mistake to try to refinish it myself. And I used epoxy finish on it not realizing that you have to keep a rod turned with that because it dries so slow that it puddled on it there and didn’t come out very good.

 

DB: Let’s look at some fishing methods from 1948, or there about. Have they changed much in the last forty years?

 

RW: Oh, absolutely.  I think the advent of the Scientific Anglers and their improvement in their fly lines probably was the greatest impetus in the change in the method of fishing, especially at, well even in all of your rivers and lakes. But up until the time that Scientific Anglers came out with their sinking lines, it was almost impossible to fish very far under the surface. In fact, I don’t think that I know of anybody that consistently used that method out at Pass Lake in the years that we had the boat house. Most of them fished a damp fly, or I would say most of them trolled.

 

DB: Now you mentioned previously that there were very few that actually came out and cast the flies.

 

RW: That’s true. There were three or four who were what you would say conventional fly fishing under today’s standards, which I knew. And of course Ralph Handy, Mel Paine from Anacortes, there was a Doc Rose from Seattle, who I think was originally from Anacortes who used to come up and fish.  He cast the fly. And so did Al Knudson and of course Louie Corbin. Probably Louie Corbin knows more about Pass Lake and the early history of it than any fisherman I know of.

 

DB: I plan to interview Louie. Ok, so the trollers, they just would put on a Professor or whatever fly and this line would sink down a foot or so under the surface.

 

RW: Yes and they’d just row around and at times it was quite productive. I don’t believe that, to my knowledge, there was very much information out on entomology and the life cycle of insects. Therefore, really, we didn’t appreciate or understand nymph fishing. Not to the extent that we know today. Well take the chironomid, which is probably the most important food for trout living in local lakes. We didn’t understand, we thought they were mosquitoes.

 

DB: So what size flies were these?

 

RW: Oh I would say, I tied a number of flies, kept a supply of Yellow Spiders out there [at] Pass Lake for those who didn’t have them.  I used to tie them on eights and sixes. 

 

DB:  Were the other patterns of similar size?

 

RW: Well, now, the Professor was number ten, I don’t think that we normally ever fished under a size ten. 

 

DB: Well, by today’s standards they were fairly large—

 

RW: That’s right, they were.  Another thing, I think I mentioned to you the other evening that we didn’t appreciate at that time either, fishing late in the evening.  Most of us when dusk set in, why we cased our rods and quit fishing.  The good fisherman like Louie Corbin, Mel Paine and some of the others were just hitting the lake when most of us were quitting. We understood the early morning fishing.  Often times we would get out at daybreak, but we didn’t fish in the evening.  I think, possibly, a lot of it could have been that we couldn’t handle a fly, we didn’t have anything to tie on hooks, [no] lights, so maybe it was just inconvenient to try to fish that way but…

 

DB: You recall then anything about the size of the cutthroat, [the] average or if there was lots of fish or…?  Of course there were fewer fishermen...

 

RW: There were fewer fishermen, and the big controversy with the Game Department over the years was that there were some of us that wanted quality fishing. There were those in the preponderance that wanted to bate fish and even fly fishing they wanted to catch fish and so I think that the Game Department, to satisfy that element of the fishing fraternity, really overplanted the lake, and so we were hard pressed to get a fish up over twelve inches, during that period of time.

 

DB: Those twelve inches would be kind of a big fish, or an average fish?

 

RW: Well, that would be the large fish, I would say.

 

DB: And the occasional one up, maybe sixteen?

 

RW: Well I don’t recall ever taking a cutthroat in those three years that we had the Pass Lake boathouse there.  Now later on, after they cut down the plant in the lake, we started seeing better growth in the fish, but they were planting as high as 80,000 fingerlings in the lake and there just wasn’t enough food out there to grow those fish over 10, 11, 12 inches.

 

DB: We have some data on some historic plants and that’d be interesting to make some comparisons.  Do you remember when they put rainbow back in?

 

RW: Not right off the top of my head, it was in the Fifties, probably about mid-Fifties. 

 

DB:  We can look; I think we have some data on that.  During these three years that you were really involved with fly fishing and Pass Lake, it was an every day deal; you had to be out there every day of the summer.

 

RW: Of the season, yes, one or the other of us was there.

 

DB: So that didn’t leave you time to go somewhere else to fish, did it?

 

RW:  No; the wife says I didn’t have enough time to do anything.

 

DB:  You worked a shift, like eight in the morning until five in the afternoon at the plant—

 

RW: No, we worked, seven, from seven until four, and from four to eleven

 

DB: And did each of you rotate?

 

RW:  Every two weeks we rotated and changed shifts see, so one or the other could be out for two weeks, one would be out early in the morning, for two weeks, and the other fellow would be out early in the evening and then we’d change it. 

 

DB: Obviously, this didn’t develop into a life [work].

 

RW:  Well actually what we had in the back of our minds at that time, course with the entrepreneur spirit burning in our chests, we were thinking that possibly the experience that we gained in this might lead us to a resort in Canada, and we looked at a couple of spots up there but nothing developed.

 

DB: Did you travel up there, and do some fishing?

 

RW:  Oh yes.

 

DB: Which lakes did you travel to up there?

 

RW:  Oh, Hihium; and Loon Lake is the one that we had a chance to buy a resort up there, and we looked at it quite closely but…

 

DB: Loon Lake?

 

RW: Yes.

 

DB: Just south of Clinton?

 

RW: Course at that time that was way up in the boondocks. 

 

DB: Yes; now…

 

RW: They’re not very far.

 

DB: I think they’re many resorts on that lake now.

 

RW: Yes. 

 

DB:  I had a long visit with a fellow this summer…

 

RW: Is that right?

 

DB: Because every September…

 

RW: Well, Loon Lake is still, I guess, productive.  They’re not big fish, but they’re real plentiful.

 

DB:  He gets nice-sized fish in September.  He always goes, and spends almost the whole month of September there and he takes his shotgun and does some grouse hunting and other things as well.  But it’s a yearly thing for him.  It’s really interesting. But, he does get some reasonably good-sized fish in the later part of the season. 

 

That’s interesting; but nothing ever came of any those things? 

 

RW: No, I think that we were probably just daydreaming. 

 

DB: How long did Heilmans keep the boats after they bought them?

 

RW: Seems to me, they kept them over there, probably all the way through the Fifties. 

 

DB: Okay, for about ten more years

 

RW: Yes, I think so.

 

DB:  Did they keep them into the Sixties?

 

RW:  It’s possible.

 

DB:  I’m just trying to think when I first was going to Pass Lake if they were still available.  I just remember some boats upside down below their old house.

 

RW: Yes.  Well those were the boats.  Well, were they painted green?

 

DB: Yes. Obviously they were the boats, but whether they were renting them then, we don’t know. Is there anything else you remember about Pass Lake?  In [the] three years, you were there all that time; do you recall water level fluctuations like we hear about now?

 

RW: It seems to me we had higher water conditions in the lake at that time because, I think I’ve spoken to you about this, [there was] that little stream running down, by the pump house there out of the field, carried enough water so that the cutthroat would attempt to spawn in there. That’s why I thought, when I was in the club, that that was an opportunity for us to develop our own spawning system.  If fact, I think the club actually did some work along that line.

 

DB: Yes, the club project got some fish up in there, cutthroat but that all fell through.  Was the Department of Fisheries using water out of the other end of the lake then for the research station down at Bowman’s Bay?  You know what I’m talking…

 

RW: Yes, yes…

 

End of Side One

 

RW:  I’m not sure if the department was actively taking water, there was an outflow that flowed down that way, but I—

 

DB:  You think that was after or before the cutthroat?

 

RW:  Well, I could be mistaken, but that pump house that was put in there, seems to me went in, in the early Fifties.  I don’t think it was there in the Forties.

 

DB: I’m hoping to talk to a fellow that was a manager out there, an Ed Primly, and see if he has any data or any information on that.  He lives in Mount Vernon.

 

RW: But I do know that the lake filled up enough so that there was an overflow during the wet [season], once it flowed down out of the lake. 

 

DB: Okay.  Were these cutthroat surface feeders?

 

RW:  That’s one reason that I always preferred the cutthroat to the rainbow was that they were a better surface feeder.  They hit the dry fly better and often times, I found, that if you could be on the lake during a little rain, as soon as the rain was stopped, they, the cutthroat would start working on the surface.

 

DB:  Did you cast, actually cast—

 

RW: Yes, I was casting to them.  Well, it was during the time… Course, I continued to fish the lake a lot in the Fifties after we gave up the boats but…

 

DB: And it was during that time that you caught bigger cutthroat?

 

RW: Right, when they started cutting down on the yearly plant.

 

DB:  But now, for surface feeders, you gave the flies that you call wet flies.  Did you change your patterns much when you went to the dry fly?

 

RW:  I developed a fly that I use [that] I call my wet-dry fly.  And actually what it was, was deer hair, spun and clipped with… Well, let’s see, what pattern is it that they …. Rat Face McDougal, I guess, is [the] closest one to what I tied.  That clipped deer hair made it flow pretty well.  But if it got a little wet, what you could do is you could throw that fly out there, and let it settle a little bit, and give a little jerk, and it would jerk it out of the water.  As soon as that thing would come out of the water, knowing you [were going] to get a strike, you’d get a strike as soon as that thing would start to sink.  That worked pretty effective for me. 

 

DB:  Do you have any of those at home?  I’m wondering if you could send us one.

 

RW:  Yes, I’m sure I could tie you one.

 

DB:  Do you still have all your equipment for tying?

 

RW:  Oh yes, down in Arizona. 

 

DB:  Okay; you remember it?

 

RW:  And I used to use that, course that wasn’t Pass Lake, but that was a real producer up at Grandy Lake.

 

DB: Well, and that was also for cutthroat?

 

RW:  Yes.

 

DB:  It would be kind of interesting to have examples of all these flies that were tied in your boathouse (the old pump house).

 

RW: Actually, it’s just a simple little pattern.  Doesn’t amount to very much but, course, it isn’t what the fly looks like sometimes, it’s what it simulates.

 

DB: And you made that still on the number eights?

 

RW: Oh by that time, I was going down; I was tying smaller hooks, going down to oh, fourteens.

 

DB:  Okay

 

RW: One of the things that really interested me in the fishing, and it made fishing Pass Lake a combination of fishing and hunting, was in the evening, these cutthroats would start surfacing and one fish would surface periodically right across the lake, and we didn’t, at that time, know what they were doing.  But we would row and get ahead of them, and we could make two or three casts, and try to intercept the fly, and if you got it timed just right so you moved your fly right in front of them as they intersected the fly you might get a strike.  The problem was that normally you were ahead of them, and they were taking it on a slack line and it was very difficult to time it so that you hooked the fly on them, if you see what I mean.  But I chased this one fish back and forth across that lake two and three times before I finally put him down.

 

DB:  Oh.  Now this was in the Fifties?

 

RW: Yes.  Now those were bigger cutthroat, they were running up maybe fourteen, fifteen inches.

 

DB: We had a club member named Emory Harrison…

 

RW: Yes.

 

DB: And he talked about this; was he fishing by then?

 

RW:  Yes, he was.

 

DB: Okay. 

 

Interruption

 

DB: Were the rainbow as active on the surface as the cutthroat.

 

RW: At least it hasn’t been my experience, but the cutthroat we call them cruisers.  They look like they have a mind of their own, they just look like they’d been wound up with a string on them, and every so often up they’d come up, and they’d take a bug.  And they’d go down, and they didn’t always go in a straight line.  They would zig-zag back and forth but I’ve chased the same fish many, many times back and forth across the lake, two or three times before they’d finally go down. 

 

DB:  So, how often did Al (Knudson) come up to fish Pass Lake, four or five times a year?

 

RW:  Oh, Al, oh he came up pretty regular. Sometimes, I would say, once a week.  He would be out on the lake. 

 

DB:  Who were some of the other people that we might know that would go out on a regular basis?

 

RW:  Well, I’ll tell you, one of the fellows who really fished it real hard, and this was later in the Fifties, and that was Bart Barber.

 

DB:  Oh, I’ll go out and talk to him.  He might have some—

 

RW:  Oh yes, that’s right.  He fished it real hard; used to fish over there, his favorite spot was over by the rocks.  Used to anchor off there and fish that practically every night.

 

DB:  Anyone else that…?

 

RW: Course, John Barber was the one that taught me how to fly-cast. 

 

DB: Now [are they] related?

 

RW:  Yes, they were related; I think Bart was a nephew. 

 

DB:  These fellows were double haulers?

 

RW: Yes, they were double haulers and John Barber; he wasn’t what I would call a good fisherman.  But he could cast.  Back in those days he was throwing out a full length of fly line with a double taper, and that’s ninety feet.  And he, I know, with his [tournament] line that he had spliced up why he would throw it out a hundred and thirty feet. That’s a long ways for an amateur.

 

DB: You bet.  Well a hundred and twenty feet won the Federation distance casting.

 

RW:  Yes, John was good. 

 

DB: Is he still around?

 

RW: No, he’s dead. 

 

DB: Oh. Bart’s still around though?

 

RW: I think so.

 

DB: He’s not very well I’ve heard.

 

Interruption

 

DB:  Warren (Erholm) had a lot of ideas about fly lines and he was very bold in the splicing and making, but that was more for steelhead wasn’t it?

 

RW:  Well, no, it was for everything because he and I both got into this line splicing, and I did a lot of line splicing out there at the old pump house.   When I was out there, I made up, I guess a dozen lines.  They were a seven taper line, made out of level, old Newton silk, which was the best silk we could find at that time. 

 

DB:  Now how’d you splice them?

 

RW:  Well, I put a needle in my vise, and started working down the end of the fly line separating the material until I got it down for  about a  half an inch, and then I divided it, on both sections and put them together and then wrapped them from the center both ways with fine silk thread.

 

DB: Oh, you didn’t have epoxies and stuff then, like now?

 

RW: No.

 

DB: But that’s similar to what’s been done with epoxies.

 

RW: It’s the same principle.  But then what we did with that was then we varnished it.  And after I varnished them, the last coat, I put powdered graphite over that to make it slick.

 

DB:  Did you ever consider putting a piece of monofilament line in like some people do now for splicing?

 

RW:  No, never. 

 

DB: From each side?

 

RW:  Yes; no never gave it a thought.  I don’t think it was ever done at that time.

 

Interruption

 

DB: Okay, go ahead.  Russ is going to tell us a bit here about some steelhead fishing. 

 

RW:  I was going to reminisce about the first trophy steelhead that I took, and that was in 1955.  I was fishing alone on the Skagit River, and I had run up from the old Lyman ferry where I had launched the boat, and brought it up to a favorite drift, that was called the Ranchoree.  The river was running pretty high at that time, although the visibility wasn’t too bad.  It had about three to three and a half feet of visibility.  And I’d come down about half way down the drift, I was anchored, and I hooked this fish, and I started playing it.  After about a half an hour, I realized that I’d really gotten hold of a good fish.  And in about another fifteen minutes, I had the fish up close to the boat, but I couldn’t land it, alone.  And he—

 

DB: Now you’ve got a total of a half an hour involved with this fish right now?

 

RW: Yes, at least a half an hour.  And, I knew it was a good fish because the visibility was about three feet and when the fish tipped up close to the boat I could just barely see his tail, so I knew that it was a good fish.  I didn’t know what to do.   I didn’t dare lay the rod down to pull the anchor, to try to get into the beach.  So I decided that I would just hold onto this fish, hoping that a fisherman would come down in a drift boat and help me.  After about another forty-five minutes (and I had it on over an hour then), some guides come down, in a drift boat and I called them over, and they pulled me over into the shallows.  Of course I had my waders on and the fish was completely exhausted, so I landed it.  It was just, fifteen pounds, two ounces. 

 

DB: And how long was it, approximately? 

 

RW: It was about—

 

DB: Thirty nine inches?

 

RW: About thirty-seven.

 

DB: Thirty-seven inches. And, what time of year was that?

 

RW:  It was in December.  I entered it in Field and Stream, and I got, I think it was third place that year.

 

DB: December, 1955.  And what fly were you using that time?

 

RW: I was using a pattern of my own makeup, which was very close to a Polar Shrimp.  There were a lot of take offs on the Polar Shrimp. 

 

DB:  Now this was competition against fish out of Northern Canada by then?  Were they fishing up in the Skeena River and those big fish where…?

 

RW: They hadn’t started fishing the Skeena at that time. 

 

DB: So the competition was against rainbows from where that would be bigger?  You say you were third.

 

RW:  I was third.  Eel River in California, the Klamath (Oregon) and, let’s see, there wasn’t anything back East at that time, because they hadn’t planted the Great Lakes at that time.

 

DB:  Was this third based on fly caught, or…?

 

RW: Fly, yes.

 

DB:  What time of day?

 

RW:  It was right around noon.

 

DB:  Did you launch your boat at the Lyman ferry?

 

RW:  The old Lyman ferry.

 

DB: What kind of boat did you have then?

 

RW:  I’d bought that boat from my neighbor, Alf Bowman.  It was a sixteen foot runabout. 

 

DB:  Oh, oh, okay, it wasn’t really a riverboat?

 

RW: No, it wasn’t a riverboat.  It was a combination boat that you could use out in the salt chuck, and—

 

DB:  Maybe like a twenty-five horse motor on it?

 

RW:  We used to have a fifteen horse on it.

 

DB: Fifteen?

 

RW: [Yes].

 

RW: I can’t think the make of the boat, I think it—

 

DB:  Was it fiberglass, or?

 

RW: No, it was wooden.

 

End of Side Two