Babine River Trip Report-Oct. 26-November 1

After sending the first bunch of guys home the day before in a cold, minus 5 wind, the second bunch arrived in camp around 9 AM. This second week had both anglers who have joined us at the Babine many times, and those who have never been Steelheading, much less to the Babine.

Our second week can be summed up on the weather side as being a continuance of the previous week. Even though the weatherman kept predicting things to warm up in a few days, as each day went by he kept revising things towards the negative. 

Without question, this year the last two weeks of October were a weather anomaly. Mid-week lows turned out to be around minus 12 and daytime highs only reached minus 5. Never seen anything like it before, hope to never see it again. Our poor first-timers were, from what I saw, completely blindsided by this weather. They were likely thinking back to earlier conversations with yours truly that went something like "Oh, unless something really weird happens you'll see plus 2 to 5 temperatures at this time of year". Turns out something really weird happened. Even the guys with us who have been many times were a little befuddled by the weather.

Tributaries that ran the week before quickly froze up.

With the cooler weather, the trend of dropping water levels and temperature continued. By weeks end the water levels were not as low as I have ever seen...but close. Water temperature on October 31 was 34 degrees fahrenheit....never seen that before!

As this second week progressed, there seemed to be a fairly big push of new fish into the area. And the big bucks finally started to arrive in pretty good numbers. And even with the very cold water the bite was better than it should have been. Tougher fishing than normal but better than I would expect.

Doug P. and Dennis F. landed their first Babine Steelhead. Dennis being plagued early in the week by inexplicable long distance releases. Darren S. started the week "farming" a large percentage of the Babine's Steelhead but settled down after a couple of days and got pretty damn efficient.

Kevin S. was stunting all week! Fished his TCX 6 weight switch solely throughout the week. Worked fine, Kev's a very good caster, but I was keen to see what happened if he hooked something approaching, or exceeding, 40 inches. As it turned out that didn't happen but he caught quite a number of fish through the week.

Without question, as always happens at Norlakes, everyone still had an awesome time even though the weather was a "character builder". As a close to this report, an overview of things that I continue to try and learn, improve, master, etc. as I fish this great river kind of goes like this:

- minus 12 sucks almost as much when you're catching fish as not.

- river right snap t's continue to confuse me.

- I continue to not catch fish at Moose, even though everyone else does.

- Deep Rock owns my ass! I will figure it out one day and then pillage!

- I wish for my ashes to be scattered at Logjam! I love Lower Logjam, and it loves me.

- Finally caught fish at Upper Logjam...only took 6 or 7 years.

The new owner...some things don't change.

So, on the 14th straight day of fishing, at about 3:30 PM we arrived at our last run for the week. Laura's Pool is one of the more beautiful places on the river and a damn good Steelhead Run. With thing's winding down I asked the guy who's shown me more about the Babine than anyone, Darren Wright, to fish it with us. As a pretty nice close, at least to my trip, I got to net a fabulous 39+ inch, very deep, Babine Buck that Darren hooked within a few casts.  This fish was absolutely stunning. Beautiful colours, heavy, healthy, over 20 pounds, a perfect goodbye from the Babine.

See you in 50 weeks!