Spot Check
By Mike Wier
Lower Mokelumne River
The first fly shop I ever went into wasn’t actually a fly shop. It was a cigar shop with a corner full of fly tying materials and some basic fly gear. The old smoke shop was in the Lincoln Center in Stockton, California. There wasn’t anywhere to buy fly fishing gear in Amador County so I’d talked my mom into taking me over there one day after she got off work. I remember a bunch of eccentric looking old men sitting around in smoking vests and weird hats talking about fishing.
After a couple visits, they must have seen some potential because they talked me into joining the local fly fishing club, the Delta Fly-Fisherman. The club met once a month. It was a good way for my mom to get a few hours of free babysitting. For me, I learned a lot about tying flies and some good places to fish locally. As it turned out, the club had been leasing some private property on the Lower Mokelumne River outside of Lockford. It was an old ranching property with a bass pond and a section of the river flowing through it. At the time, I was mostly into fishing the bass pond but I budgeted a little time to try the river too. The old guys said they'd catch trout and steelhead there sometimes.
I casted a janky old flashy streamer out on a floating line hoping to entice a trout or steelhead. As it swung in the tail of a big pool, a huge shape appeared. Its mouth was wide open and it was coming right for my fly. I stripped and twitched the fly and the fish came right up behind it but never bit. I thought it was the mother of all trout but then I realized the inside of its mouth was dark instead of white like a trout. It was a huge Chinook and it just turned away and disappeared into the depth of the dark water. I probably made a thousand more casts in that spot to no avail. That image of seeing my first salmon in a river is forever etched into my memory.