Feb 15 - 22 River Flows headed up
Feb 20 - 11 am. Flows are on their way up this morning at Douglas City from an increased release at the dam. Flows are approximately 6 hours behind at Douglas City. The increase began last night around 7 pm last night and currently still rising. Flows at Douglas city are currently around 800 cfs and rising. TRRP flows are scheduled to increase and top out around 300 more cfs (1100 cfs total) in the next 24 hrs. Turbidity has increased to a visibility of around 2-3 feet and we are expecting this to rise over the next few hours. By the 24th of Feb, we expect to see waters relax in flow and visibility to return.
This would be considered high flow fishing over the course of the next few days. Because temps from the dam release are higher, expect the fish to be in moving locations during the mid afternoon (seam lines, riffle ends, side flows on deeper runs. Watch for rolling steelhead. Fishing directly below tribs would also be a good bet. Temperatures are a good indication of fish activity and we’re hovering in and out of good water temperatures. Temps at Douglas are bouncing off a new low of 42 degrees but a winter system is moving in and temps should drop after today to that magical 40 degrees where fish require you to hit them on the nose if you’re casting flies.
The incoming system has potential but the forecasts are mixed. We’re under a winter storm watch from Tues 1pm through Thurs with a cooling trend occurring on Tuesday. We’re not expecting any real precip until Thursday afternoon. They’re calling for a snow floor of around 1000 ft. We see 5-12 inches of snow in the report in the 60-70% range so we’re 50-50 on precip that will add to trib flows and change turbidity. We are sure of windy conditions on the river til Wednesday afternoon. So please drive carefully if you’ll be fishing.
On the water yesterday we did catch a few on seam lines and in relaxed winter holding places just after 1 pm on the float below the lodge. It was beautiful and a sunny day with temps nearing 70 degrees. With flows moving and low evening temps, we saw a few trout rising, a big baetis hatch, and few indications of steelhead movement. Fish were caught on Pat’s rubber legs and large orange egg patterns. After the day on the water, we felt we had to be directly on the fish for them to eat.
Feb 18 - 10 am. Flows dropped overnight from the dam to 450 cfs, making flows at Douglas City just shy of 600 cfs. Water temps took a pretty good dive overnight and we’re back to 40 degrees. We’re running around 750 cfs at Junction and clarity at the lodge looks good. We’re supposed to hit highs in the 60’s tomorrow and we’re not seeing anything on the forecast to change anything execpt for the ongoing TRRP winter flow changes.
Feb 17 1pm. Flows at Douglas are currently around 650 cfs and temps are 41ish and it looks like we’re beginning to trend upwards which should make the fish more active. It looks like the river is going to keep coming up about 100 cfs each day. The last increase started at midnight and stopped at 9 am from the dam. That increase hit Douglas City about 6 hours later. I would expect the same thing to occur again.
Feb 15 12:45 pm. As promised Trinity flows are up with the winter release and temperatures dropped today near 40 degrees at Douglas City while temps in the upper stretch are being warmed by the release and temps are near 45 degrees. We’re expecting flows to reach upwards 700 cfs by the close of the day at Douglas and continued rising to around 12-1300 cfs by the 21st. The increase will coincide with the beginning of a new low pressure system scheduled to drop less than a half inch of rain each day through till the end of March. Flows from the dam are expected to decline to a new bottom of around 600 cfs by Feb 24th. Then, flows will ratchet up to around 800 cfs until March 1st. We’re not expecting turbidity to increase although from the increase today we did see a loss of visibility in the upper river today, hovering around 2-3 feet. The river temps probably dropped so hard because we were very cold last night. A warming trend is still in effect so we’re expecting daily highs to continue to rise over the next few days, topping out at 66 degrees on Sunday; Overnight lows are expected to be around freezing.
