The Umpqua gets written about for its steelhead, which is fair, and almost never for its smallmouth, which is a crime the steelhead anglers are happy to let stand. The main stem below Elkton in October runs low and clear and the color of weak tea, and in it live more smallmouth bass per mile than almost any river in the West. Nobody in Oregon will admit this out loud. They would rather you went to the coast.
I floated it with a guide named Dale who runs a raft with a cooler bolted where the second seat ought to be, and who believes that a smallmouth under a pound is a bait fish. We put in at dawn with frost on the oar handles. The valley fog sat in the river bottom like it had paid rent, and for the first hour we fished tube jigs along the ledges blind, waiting for the sun to climb over the firs and tell us where we were.
The first fish came off a basalt shelf where the current folded over itself. It took a tube on the drop, the way they do in cold water, a tap and then weight, and it came out of the river twice before I had it to the boat. Bronze and barred and furious, maybe fifteen inches, which Dale allowed was a fish. The next twenty were about the same, and I stopped counting around the time the fog lifted and the river turned the color of a penny in the sun.
October is the month the smallmouth stack up before winter, Dale says. They move off the shallow summer riffles into the deep slots and feed like they are being charged for the privilege. We found one pool below a gravel bar where he said to cast and keep casting, and I had a fish on every third drift for the better part of an hour. He ate a sandwich and offered unsolicited commentary on my hook set. A merganser worked the far bank. A steelheader in a drift boat passed us, saw the spinning rods, and did not wave.
We took out at dusk with sore forearms and no fish in the cooler, because nobody keeps them, and because the cooler was full of other things. Dale says the Umpqua smallmouth is the best fishing in Oregon that nobody wants you to know about, and that he includes himself in the nobody. Then he gave me his card.
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