Emerald Water Anglers

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Seattle Fly Shop - Guide Service - Global Travel Outfitter

4502 42nd Ave. SW Seattle, WA 98116
10-7 Mon-Fri, 10-6 Sat, 11-5 Sun
info@emeraldwateranglers.com
206-708-7250
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Upcoming Events – October

October 1, 2019 by adminewa Leave a Comment

Fall is officially on our plate and so are exciting events, the impending holiday season, winter steelhead and some of the finest fall fly fishing opportunities WA has to offer. Klickitat, Yakima and the Sound are all on fire and we offer professional experiences to all three so book today and we look forward to seeing you at one or all of the events below.

Bug’s + Brew’s — Women’s Fly Tying Sessions — $25 Each — Follow our women’s Instagram page @ewa_women for updates on other upcoming events.

November 12th: Reverse Spider
December 3rd: Marbou Popsicle (Intermediate)
December 17th: Skagit Mist (Advanced)
January 7th: Skwala Stones
January 21st: Blue Wing Olives

October 22, 2019 — Destination Spotlight — Africa — @ EWA Fly Shop — 7pm — FREE
Our very good friends Rob Scott and Keith Clover from Tourette/African Waters will be in town to present and answer questions about all things fly fishing in Africa. This includes Sudan for GT’s, Tanzania for Tigerfish, Gabon for giant Tarpon and Cameroon for huge Nile Perch. Please join us for an exceptionally informative and entertaining evening!

October 24, 2019 — Get to Know Your NGO — @ EWA Fly Shop — 7pm – FREE
There is a lot going on in our region for the sake of fish, water, land and how they are managed. Come meet each of the NGO’s we work closely with and gain a better idea of who represents what is most important to you and your values. Excited to have TU, Wild Steelhead Coalition, Long Live the Kings, Native Fish Society and Puget SoundKeeper Alliance

Spey School – Learn from our well versed professional staff of guides/instructors the fine craft of spey casting and swinging for steelhead as this is ALL we do! 3 anglers max per school, call to reserve!

Nov. 11, 2019
Dec. 12, 2019
Jan. 17, 2020

Intro to Fly Tying

Nov. 19, 2019

January 24, 2020 — F3T West Seattle — Admiral Theater — $16
This is the season opener to get hyped about this sport and all it encompasses. Filmmakers travel to all corners of the globe to pursue exotic fish like GT’s, Arapaima, Payara, Taimen and even Rainbow Trout! Always a great time tickets available online or at the store.

February 2, 2020 — EWA Spey Day — Snoqualmie River under Fall City Bridge — 9am – 3pm — FREE
The premier spey event in western WA, come cast the latest and greatest in two handed rods and lines with our staff, sales reps and special guests. This is the perfect opportunity to hone your skills, get some one on one instruction or figure out the optimal match of line and rod for the winter season.

February 15 & 16, 2020 — The Fly Fishing Show — Lynwood — $16
We will be attending the show again this year. Great opportunity to hear Dave McCoy talk on Puget Sound and fly fishing around Washington. See his all new photos and insights on how, when, where and with what on some of our most dynamic fisheries.

May 30, 2020 — EWA Fly Fest — @ Location TBD – 9am – 3pm — FREE
Our annual kick off of summer event will be better than ever with more classes including spey casting, more guest speakers and more reps from the industry and of course the guide cook off.

Filed Under: Emerald Water Anglers, Events Tagged With: Africa, African Waters, fly casting instruction, fly fishing events, fly fishing guides, fly fishing schools, Fly Fishing Seattle, fly fishing travel, Klickitat River, Puget sound fly fishing, Sea Run Cutthroat, Seattle Fly Shop, spey casting, steelhead fishing, Tacoma, Tourette Fishing, Women's casting, women's fly fishing, Yakima River

Upcoming Events – June

June 5, 2019 by adminewa Leave a Comment


June 1, 2019 — EWA Fly Fest and Guide Cook-Off — Me-Kwa-Mooks Park– FREE
Our 5th year of this event and we are already excited for it.  So many cool new products, new staff and new techniques to show and share with all of you.  Event is from 9am – 3pm with the cook-off happening at 12:30.  Class schedule will be posted about a month in advance. 

June 1, 2019 — Summer Steelhead Fly Tying Demo w/Katy Watson — @ EWA Store @6pm — FREE
Come watch as British Columbia steelhead guide and Spey – O – Rama contestant Katy meets and greets, answers questions and shows how to tie some of her favorite low water patterns for BC steelhead.

Intro to Fly Casting — Lincoln Park, north parking lot next to baseball field — $25 — Equipment Provided

Wednesday, June 5, 6:30PM sign up here
Wednesday, June 12, 6:30PM sign up here
Saturday, June 15, 9AM sign up here
Saturday, June 22, 9AM sign up here
Wednesday, July 10, 6:30PM sign up here

June/July/August — Photographer Series — @ EWA Store @7pm — FREE
Come learn from some of our leading industry photographers on how to better compose images, tell stories and be better with your DSLR camera or smart phone. Here is who is on deck so far…

June 20 — – Matt DeLorme, Telling a Store in 10 Images @ 7pm at EWA Store – FREE
July 20 — – Dave McCoy, Underwater Imagery @ 7pm at EWA Store – FREE
July 25 — – Colton Jacobs, iPhone Composition @ 7pm at EWA Store FREE
August 1 – Earl Harper, Portraits in the Field @ 7pm at EWA Store – FREE

July TBD — Get to Know Your NGO — @ EWA Store @7pm — FREE
A full room of our favorite non profits from around this region doing great work for our land, water and fish. Date coming soon..

May 30, 2020 — EWA Fly Fest — @ Location TBD – 9am – 3pm — FREE
Our annual kick off of summer event will be better than ever with more classes including spey casting, more guest speakers and more reps from the industry and of course the guide cook off.

Filed Under: Emerald Water Anglers, Events Tagged With: Emerald Water Anglers, fly casting classes, fly fishing events, fly fishing reports, fly fishing schools, June, Photographer Series, Puget Sound, Rainbow Trout, Sea Run Cutthroat, Seattle, Seattle Fly Fishing, Seattle Fly Shop, summer fly fishing, summer steelhead, Yakima River

EWA Fly Fishing Events – May

April 26, 2018 by adminewa Leave a Comment


EWA Fly Fishing events coming up in May and beyond…here are some things to put on your calendar for sure!  As we head into summer, now is the time to freshen up your casting with some private casting, finally pick up fly tying or join us on one of our many fishing excursions we offer throughout the summer.  Creeks, Yakima, Puget Sound, bass and summer steelhead are all on the table, we know them all and are excited to get on the water with you. 

Yakima May Day’s – May is maybe the month to be on the Yakima as caddis are out, fish are focused and the sun is usually shining.  Here are some dates in May we still have open to get you out throwing dry flies on the Yak:

May 9th
May 27th

May 8, 2018 — Christmas Island Revisited! — 7pm @ EWA Store — FREE
Come listen and watch as Karlie and Caldwell revisit their trips to Christmas Island this past spring.  Beverages will be provided and good times will be had for sure!

June 2, 2018 – EWA Fly Fest @ Me Kwa Mooks Park in West Seattle – FREE
What has become quite an event continues to grow.  Cast every rod available from Winston, Sage, Scott, Loomis, Epic, Echo, Fenwick and Thomas and Thomas.  See the latest in reels from Nautilus, Bauer, Lamson, Sage, Tibor, 3 Tand and more as well as put new lines on your favorite rod.  Instruction, classes, seminars and our 11th Annual Guide Staff Cook Off.

July 20-21, 2018 — 2nd Annual EWA Carp Tournament @ Banks Lake — $75 per angler/50 Max
If you haven’t pursued carp on the fly before you haven’t lived!  Sight casting to these selective and strong fish either by foot, from an SUP or $60K boat, either way, they live up to what fly fishing is supposed to be…fun!  Sponsored by Sage, winners will walk with some extraordinary prizes and all with leave humbled for sure!  Please call the store to book you space, few slots left.

December 1 -2, 2018 — Dec Hogan Spey Clinic — $295 per person/6 maximum
The man, myth and legend, Dec himself will be back in the PNW to enlighten and answer questions on all things spey and steelhead.  Whether just learning or well seasoned, Dec is always a pleasure to spend the day with.  Please call the store to reserve your space.

Bug’s ‘N Brew’s – $20 – EWA Store @ 7-9pm – Women Only!
May 3rd – 7-9pm
May 17th – 7-9pm

1 Day Intro to Fly Fishing Schools – $225 – Forks of the Snoqualmie – 3 people max
June 23rd – 1 spot open
July 11th – 2 spots open

2 Day Fly Fishing Immersion Schools – $425 – Forks of the Snoqualmie -3 people max
May 5-6 – 2 spots open
June 20-21 – 2 spots open
June 23-24 – 1 spot open
July 14 – 15 – 1 spot open

Drift Boat Rowing – $250 – Snoqualmie River, 3 people max
June 23rd
July 7th

Filed Under: Emerald Water Anglers, Events Tagged With: bass, boat rowing, carp tournament, Dec Hogan, Emerald Water Anglers, fly fishing event, fly fishing schools, fly tying, guiding trips, Seattle, spey casting, steelhead, trout, Washington, women's fly fishing, Yakima River

Yakima Steelhead…Ponder This!

October 15, 2013 by adminewa Leave a Comment

Bob Margulis of the Wild Steelhead Coalition just passed along a note from someone that I thought might be of interest to those in the anadromous world regarding steelhead in the Columbia Basin in particular the Yakima River region:

The 6,000 steelhead returning to the Yakima has to be put into the perspective that most of the present production is coming out of Satus Creek and Toppenish Creek.  There remains an immense amount of fine habitat in the Yakima outside those two streams.  The Naches River alone should be having returns of over 6,000 steelhead, Satus and Toppenish each 2,000 and the upper mainstem Yakima and many of its tributaries such as Big Creek, Cabin Creek, Teanaway River, and many others should have at least another 6,000-10,000 … even under present conditions.  Given the good passage conditions in the Columbia in recent years and the good overall ocean conditions, the Yakima should be having wild steelhead returns of 15,000-20,000.

During the early to mid 1980s when the then NW Power Planning Council (now NW Power and Conservation Council) began to have discussions about making the Yakima the poster child for Columbia Basin recovery, it was estimated that the Yakima Basin was second only to the Snake Basin in numbers of returning salmon and steelhead.  It was estimated that it’s historic returns were 600,000 combined total with 100,000 of those being steelhead.

However, our present work on the Columbia using amount of available gravel as found in the 1930s to estimate salmon returns suggest that there was sufficient gravel available for about 1.5-2 million spring Chinook alone in the Yakima basin … and that was the most conservative estimate.  If we had used what is a more probable redd area per spawning pair of Chinook it would have been more on the order of 3-5 million.  We have not completed our mathematical runs per gravel available for all the species, but the Yakima had large runs of coho, steelhead, fall Chinook, and sockeye — the latter having 3 large lakes available (Kachess, Keechelus, and Cle Elum) and one smaller lake (Bumping).  In 1916 there was a count made of the number of salmonid juveniles killed in one irrigation field watering of some 200 acres near Yakima.  From that count expanded to the total irrigation acreage at the time, it was computed that about 4.5 million outmigrating smolts were being killed with each watering in the Yakima basin.  Subsequently in the 1920s it was better determined how many waterings occurred per year and the final estimate was that some 20 million outmigrating salmonids were annually killed via diversion onto irrigation fields where they died.  This did not include how many juveniles were killed in the irrigation canals each year when annually dewatered each fall.  It was only a count of those that went out onto the fields being irrigated when diverted from the canals.  This was long after the sockeye runs had already been wiped out in the very early 1900s by construction of dams at the outlets of each of the lakes already mentioned that had no passage systems.  And salmon runs overall were known to have severely declined in the Columbia basin from 1883 onward.  By the 1916-1920 period of time salmon numbers (adult and juvenile) were a fraction of that when Lewis and Clark Expedition occurred.

Just for a couple comparative examples, Osoyoos Lake on the upper Okanagan this year will have a run-size of wild sockeye of about 450,000 (515,000+ have thus far passed Bonneville most of which are destined there).  That is only one lake and Osoyoos is still in recent process of recovery.  Lake Quinault historically had an estimated wild sockeye run-size of one million as late as 1941 (tribal harvest of 500,000 that year).  Obviously, the NWPPC Yakima basin estimate back in the 1980s was a lowball estimate at 600,000 total salmon and steelhead along with the historic estimate of 100,000 steelhead.  I do not have a present estimate we will eventually have for historic Yakima steelhead based on spawning gravel, but I can guarantee it will be well above 100,000.  The Yakima is an immense basin and steelhead historically used nearly all of it.

For instance, we estimated that the Snohomish basin in 1895 had steelhead runs of about 160,000 and the Nooksack 140,000 or more (Skagit about 105,000 and Stillaguamish about 75,000).  None of the Puget Sound rivers had the available basin area the Yakima historically had, and no Puget Sound river had the productivity of the Yakima.  The Clearwater River of Idaho had a count of 46,000 steelhead past Lewiston Dam in the early 1960s (before any hatchery program there) and that was after many were harvested in lower Columbia commercial and sport fisheries as well as in Snake River sport fisheries prior to Clearwater River entry (this was after The Dalles Dam inundated Celilo Falls in 1957 and tribal fisheries had yet shifted to gill netting as the former dip net fishery was eliminated).  Again, the Yakima basin size is larger than the Clearwater and greater productivity per mile of available stream.

Filed Under: Emerald Water Anglers Tagged With: Bill McMillan, Columbia River Basin, dams, Oregon, returning numbers, Washington, Wild Steelhead, WSC, Yakima River

Portion of Yakima River Closed Due to Illegal Steelhead Targeting

January 25, 2012 by adminewa

For those who live in the state of Washington, it is of little surprise to see or hear of poaching of water for our beloved steelhead. Few steelheaders in the region know that there are wild steelhead that return to the Yakima River at all and of those that do most know it is illegal to target them, most abide by the law and do not but obviously some can’t resist or think it is cool to be doing so. At any rate, enough of this has occurred to force the hand at least the Yakima Tribe to close a portion of the river to curtail it happening where they can control it. See the rest of the piece here:

http://sportsyakima.com/2012/01/yakama-nation-closes-boundary-reach-to-anglers/

I have seen this on other rivers in our state, namely the Methow and the Klickitat where the f–king whitefish loop hole allows anglers to go pursue steelhead under the guise of fishing for whitefish. How many anglers, especially fly anglers actually go target these fish around here??? What a joke, close that stupid whitefish fishery at the same time steelhead are closed so enforcement is easy, on a river fishing while closed, busted! Jesus, how hard can it be?

Filed Under: Emerald Water Anglers Tagged With: Emerald Water Anglers, river closure, steelhead, Washington, Yakima River

An ode to bent rods…

January 8, 2011 by adminewa

Sitting here going through thousands of unedited photos from all over the world I was struck by the number of times I have kept an image simply because the subject in it had a bent fly rod.

While you can’t always see the fish, which would be the next best thing, for fly anglers or anglers period for that matter, to see a bent rod…we know what it means and we get excited about.

From 14 wts on tuna and sailfish to spey rods on steelhead and even those wispy little glass or ultralight negative 0wt rods on 6 inch fish, a bent rod in a still image conjures up emotions and makes all of us wish we were there, anywhere.

So here is brief homage to our favorite pastime, or profession depending on who you are, and the tool of our trade.

Upper Yakima River, Theo, fish on! Good way to start!


Karn putting a laser out there on the Grande Ronde.


Yeah, I even fish sometimes too. Hey you Pacu, come over here! Dave in Bolivia and I almost got that B2mx turned 180 degrees.


Dad into one on an unamed stream in Chile.


Andrew Bennett into one on the Cowlitz River, momentarily anyway.


Nancy Kim finds a last minute fish on the Skagit River.


John Baugn stressing out the 000wt on the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie.


Yeah Laker!! John Lake puts some schtick to a tuna off the Washington coast. Be careful though…


Rods are only supposed to bend so far. Donte going between admiring his fish and his new 11 piece 12wt. Oopsie Daisey!

Fish everyone, and hopefully fish on!

Filed Under: Emerald Water Anglers Tagged With: bent rods, Bolivia, Chile, Cowlitz River, Emerald Water Anglers, fly rods, Grande Ronde, Skagit River, tuna, Yakima River

EWA Featured Photographer — Alex Collier

January 5, 2011 by adminewa

Our next guide staff member to share some of their photography passions is Alex Collier, our backcountry creek and alpine lake specialist. More of his images are throughout our site. Enjoy.

A caddis sits on the water, waiting…


Dave guiding an angler, actually guiding it looks like!


A beautiful upper Yakima rainbow.


A March Brown settles in for a brief rest.


An angler trying to match his line on a mountain creek.


Close-up of a westslope cutts face from the St. Joe River in Idaho.


Alpine lakes, a view only for those willilng to get there.


A cutthroat takes the offering, a day complete.

Filed Under: Emerald Water Anglers Tagged With: cutthroat, Emerald Water Anglers, photography, St. Joe River, Washington, Yakima River

Upper Yakima…

March 1, 2010 by Alex Collier

DSC_0995

If you’re looking for some fish to take your mind off of the pitiful state of the Puget Sound Steelhead for an afternoon, might we suggest the Upper Yakima?  In a 6 cast stretch on one hole Ted landed a 14+ inch native cuttie, 2 other fish of the same size cruised by, and I landed this 24+ rainbow.  There’s plenty of bugs coming off, and when the water ticks up a few degrees it’s going to be game on.  And while these fish definitely won’t make you forget about the early closing of the Puget Sound Steelhead rivers again, this one proved that a rod bending and reel peeling fight doesn’t have to wait till fall.

Filed Under: Emerald Water Anglers Tagged With: Emerald Water Anglers, hatches, Rainbow Trout, Spring, trout, Washington, Yakima River

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4502 42nd Ave. SW
Seattle, WA 98116
10-7 Mon-Fri, 10-6 Sat, 11-5 Sun
206-708-7250

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