Low tide on a Puget Sound inlet. The water level dropped almost 14 feet in seven hours.
I hear that my fishing fanatic friend Greg Cloud was a talented musician back in the day, and I believe it -- even though I've never seen him pick up an instrument.
But I've seen Greg play the Puget Sound tides quite a few times, and few anglers are better at reading the music of flowing water, quirky winds and fickle sea-run cutthroat trout.
We launched Greg's boat on a cool, drizzly morning a few days ago, and the high tide had water pushed all the way up the beach -- and under the overhanging shoreline trees. Greg cranked the motor, and we raced across the water in a cold wind of our own making.
The dance with the tides was just about to begin.
Fly fishing for sea-run cutts is a different game when you're on a boat. You can move from spot to spot, and dozens of miles of empty shoreline await your casts. Greg likes to launch at high tide -- or close to it -- on a day where the tide will suck lots of water out of a Puget Sound inlet. Inlets are the long, narrow fingers of water that spread inland from the main, deeper section of Puget Sound. Inlets are places of rocky bluffs, pebbly, shelly beaches and papery-barked madrone trees hanging over salt water. These fingers of water restrict and strengthen tidal flows -- think of how the water spurts from a garden hose when you hold your thumb over the nozzle.
Lots of water flow means lots of baitfish, shrimp, tiny crabs and marine worms in the current -- and, hopefully, lots of sea-run cutts chowing down the the seafood buffet. The critters have to get into the current to avoid stranding on dry beach. All the creatures that swim or scrabble around underwater have to move downcurrent to deeper water -- or dry up and die.
Everything is moving in a giant seafood feast. Bigger creatures eat smaller creatures -- and the cutts and resident coho salmon feed like mad. Of course, you've got to find them to catch them, and that is another piece of this elegant puzzle of tides, weather and fish.
On this day, high tide was at 10 a.m. -- more or less -- and the water level was at 13.6 feet. Low tide was scheduled for 4:25 p.m., and the water level was predicted to drop all the way down to 0.2 feet. So, the water level in this inlet would drop 13.4 feet in seven hours. That is a lot of water, and the upper reaches of the inlet would almost completely dry up. A small creek of tidal water -- along with freshwater pouring in from creeks and streams -- would be all the water left in the top of the inlet it by 3:30 p.m. Most of the inlet would be mud flats, oyster beds and gravel bars.
Puget Sound is notorious for huge changes in tide levels, and the tide can drop to minus levels -- say, -1.2 feet or even more -- during certain times of the year, especially near the summer solstice. Most Puget Sound inlets go almost dry during these big tides, and million-dollar yachts mooring at exclusive marinas squat in tidal muck.
It's weird to ride a boat into an inlet and know that most of the water will be gone in a few hours. Of course, it returns during the rising tide. On this tidal cycle, the next high tide would be 13.2 feet and would arrive just after midnight.
Fishing a Puget Sound inlet during the falling tide is kind of like fishing a lake that is draining. The current is strong, and narrow sections of the inlet look like a flowing river. Good anglers like to start high up in the inlet and gradually drift downcurrent as the water level drops. Anglers that keep moving downcurrent can find water -- and fish -- hours after upcurrent spots became dry beach.
Narrow sections of an inlet constrict and speed the tidal flow. It's that old thumb-over-the- hose deal again. Narrows also funnel all that drifting and swimming cutt food into a smaller area. Greg once showed me that a narrow section will still have current -- and feeding cutts and coho -- late in the tide, well after the current slows in wider spots.
Anglers that know this seek out narrow stretches late in a tide -- they can be that good.
You don't want to anchor the boat in the inlet and walk up the beach for an hour or so of shoreline casting, as the boat will be high and dry for the next 10 hours or so. And I've seen that happen. It happened to me once, but my kayak was light enough to drag down to the water.
Greg grew up on Puget Sound, and he's tuned into the tides. We eased up the inlet to a good area. Sure enough, a nice rip was peeling off a point that poked into the inlet. The rip -- the fishy seam between fast and slow water -- also poured over a shallow, shelly bar and dropped off into a series of standing waves. Standing waves form when water flowing over a shallow area reaches a sudden dropoff to deep water. Sea-run cutts love that edge between shallow and deep water. Sea-run cutts love almost any kind of edge.
Greg knows all this -- and it's why his boat is rigged with a pulley on the bow. Greg finds a good spot, points the boat into the current and feeds the anchor line over the bow pulley until it lodges on the bottom. It's kind of like anchoring a driftboat in a river.
Greg's sinking fly line sent a pink Knudsen Spider right over the dropoff, and he hooked two nice cutts on his first two casts. I got to take the photos of the gleaming, black-spotted fish and slip out the barbless hook.
"Two fish on two casts!" Greg said. "I love this spot."
We caught and released a couple more fish -- Greg brought a beefy, 17-inch-long cutt to the boat -- before the spot went dead. Then Greg started playing the tide. All he had to do was raise the anchor and let the boat drift downcurrent to the next likely spot. Then he eased the anchor back down to the bottom, and we were in business.
I got to catch the first cutt at this spot -- mostly because I made a sneaky cast while Greg was still fussing around with the anchor line.
The tide kept rushing away, and the nearby beach keep getting wider and wider. This means that fishy rip, dropoff, oyster bed or cluster of drowned root wads that was so hot will soon be high and dry. The fish, which are not interested in dry beach, move downcurrent with the water. We anglers have to keep moving too.
Greg's way of raising and dropping the anchor to sneakily ease down to different sections of a beach is elegant and simple -- kind of like Miles Davis blowing "Summertime." It also seems pretty obvious, but I rarely see other boating anglers use this method. I didn't do it until I spent time on Greg's boat. It's easier to crank up that noisy engine and rattle off to another spot. I've never asked Greg where he learned how to play the tides this way, but I suspect it was while fishing a local inlet as a boy.
At times Greg will look back upcurrent at a spot we'd already fished, cock his head a little -- it lookslike he was listening to some internal radio station -- and then pull the anchor, crank up the boat and move back upcurrent a little way. Rips change -- they appear and vanish and appear again as the water level changes -- and a spot that was fishless 45 minutes ago may teem with fish right now. Or not.
It never hurts to find out.
We ran across the inlet to a long beach with a bottom that undulates between shallow and deep water. The waterlogged remains of old cedar pilings and log cribbing are mired into the bottom pebbles, and cutthroat trout often lay in the green, glowing water off the shallow dropoffs to ambush bait. Other cutts hover just in front of the log cribbings -- which create a cushion from the current and funnel bait to greedy mouths.
The water just offshore was too deep for easy anchoring, so Greg unlimbered another instrument to play this tide. I stood in the stern while Greg kept the engine humming at near-idle speeds -- just enough to keep us in place in the current hissing along the hull. I cast Knudsen Spider flies to the pilings or the dropoffs. Every now and then, Greg bumped the throttle into neutral to drift us downcurrent to another spot. All this is like rowing a river driftboat to keep it in one spot.
I bungled the one good take on this beach -- both of us saw the bright flash of the big cutthroat as it came up out of the dropoff and then wiggled off the hook.
But we both laughed, as it was still early in the falling tide, and we had lots of beaches just downcurrent -- and more tidal music left this drizzly, early spring day.
