My friend Andrew and I had a pretty decent day on the Wynoochee river in Grays Harbor County on 01/16/19. We floated from the new 7400 road launch area all the way down to White Bridge, the water was flowing at about 1900cfs with three feet of visibility at the start of the day with water clarity improving as the day progressed. We had four hookups and managed to land two bright hatchery steelhead in the 6-8 pound range, and lost two others with one of them suspected of being ‘the river guardian’ (lol) as it ran upriver and nearly spooled us and got off before we ever got a glimpse of him/her. All of our bites came on free-drifted bait and yarn-balls; we did do some plug pulling and swinging of flies to no avail, so we figured it was best to fish on the move as there is limited daylight this time of year for such a long section of river. To summarize I’d say the Wynoochee is a good bet at the moment, there seems to be a good amount of steelhead in the river as most anglers we chatted with were at least having an encounter or two.

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