Tualatin River Fishing

lol, Last weekend, first cast in the Tualatin, I lost a brand new Rooster Tail. *sigh*
 
Hey im new here but ill through my 2 cents went to cook park today caught a 4 inch cutthroat using a redworm on the fish dock casted toward the right were theres bushes in the water. but after that it went dead besides the crawfish stealing the bait. im going back tmrw gonna use cheese balls and the worms and will wait to see what bites lol
 
Took the kids out yesterday and caught three squaws using worms. They had a lot of fun since we've been skunked on our previous trips.
 
Where is Fanno Creek?

Been lookin for a good spot to launch the drift boat or pontoon boat. Cook park dont open the gate till almost 8am. Who starts that late in the day anyway? Gotta get out early, fish hard, that way there is time for a nap before dinner!
 
I'm new to the area and live over on Pleasant Valley Rd and Scholls Ferry, the property backs onto the river. Has anyone fished the Tualatin in this area and could advise me on the best methods? Thanks in advance.
 
Never had a chance to fish it but would love to try sometime. Hear stories of bass and panfish galore.
 
Davefal said:
I'm new to the area and live over on Pleasant Valley Rd and Scholls Ferry, the property backs onto the river. Has anyone fished the Tualatin in this area and could advise me on the best methods? Thanks in advance.
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Dave - your below the cut off line for bait fishing, so when it's open, you can try any method you like. Hard to beat the good ole night crawler if you're bait fishing - though if you want to target say, carp, try balled up sandwhich bread fished weightless near the shore in about 2'to 4' of water.

I like fishing spinners and floater-diver rapalas on the tualatin - or pitching grub and tube jigs for bass.

If your ever in the need for a fishing partner to fish your back yard, I don't live too far away :) Wouldn't mind showing you my carp rig - that stretch of river has some big boys for sure.
 
I'm planning on floating on a raft from Rood Bridge Park to either eagle landing or scholls bridge. Should be a 5 hour float time, plenty of time to drift and fish I hope. I remember catching lots of Blue Gill, Perch, and Catfish out of the Tualatin as a kid, never from a floating craft though so this will be a first.
 
I want to say that above the Scholls bridge the fishing regs change. You might want to make sure your methods are OK before you go.
 
Correct - above the Hwy 210 bridge in Scholls - it's artificials only (no bait, no soft plastics!). Below the bridge - any regular angling method is OK.

They also opened the river up to 2 fish retention for trout this year, and this is the 2nd or 3rd year of a coho retention season from August to October.

If floating the river - especially through the rural sections of the county - watch out for the thousands of sweepers, dead heads, stumps, and submerged rocks. Good fish habitat, but can be dangerous for boat traffic. Also watch out for the crawfish traps in the river - I know there's at least one fellow who fishes commercially for crawfish in the stretch downstream of Rood Bridge Park - and he's told me that he's lost traps in the river before - that means the potential for submerged rope if you're using a powered boat.

Have a fun, safe float, and wear your life jacket. :)
 
Just remember that the entire river is closed to using bait (that includes all soft plastics) until May 28th and then it will be allowed below the scholls bridge.
 
beaverfan said:
Just remember that the entire river is closed to using bait (that includes all soft plastics) until May 28th and then it will be allowed below the scholls bridge.
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Doesn't that date coincide with day that the river is actually open for fishing? Isn't it closed to any species before that?
 
Correct - the entire river is closed to fishing of any type until May 28 - and it closes to all fishing on October 31st. You cannot fish for anything - at all - in the river until the end of May.
 
GungasUncle said:
Dave - your below the cut off line for bait fishing, so when it's open, you can try any method you like. Hard to beat the good ole night crawler if you're bait fishing - though if you want to target say, carp, try balled up sandwhich bread fished weightless near the shore in about 2'to 4' of water.

I like fishing spinners and floater-diver rapalas on the tualatin - or pitching grub and tube jigs for bass.

If your ever in the need for a fishing partner to fish your back yard, I don't live too far away :) Wouldn't mind showing you my carp rig - that stretch of river has some big boys for sure.
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Thanks for the heads up. I'm right down at the end of Pleasant Valley Rd off of Scholls Ferry Rd, do you know the area? Plenty of downed tress and snags. I used to do a bit of carp fishing when I lived in England, bread always used to do the trick. I haven't had any time for fishing yet, been working on the house and am currently overseas but I'll be back at the end of the month so perhaps we could have a chat about fishing the back yard :) I need to invest in some new gear as when I left the UK I gave all of my tackle to my uncle, couldn't fit it in my suitcase.

All the best.
 
Davefal said:
Thanks for the heads up. I'm right down at the end of Pleasant Valley Rd off of Scholls Ferry Rd, do you know the area? Plenty of downed tress and snags. I used to do a bit of carp fishing when I lived in England, bread always used to do the trick. I haven't had any time for fishing yet, been working on the house and am currently overseas but I'll be back at the end of the month so perhaps we could have a chat about fishing the back yard :) I need to invest in some new gear as when I left the UK I gave all of my tackle to my uncle, couldn't fit it in my suitcase.

All the best.
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Hey Dave - that sounds great. I know the area well - I grew up just a few miles away.

The river opens up for fishing at the end of May - so you've got a couple months before that particular water is open - but there's other close by opportunities, especially if you want to get into some carp again.

Did you fish the ledger style rods when you were in the UK, or maybe the long telescoping poles, or just regular spinning gear?

Drop me a line when you get back into town, we'll have to hook up!
 
For clarification which is the upper and which is the lower/bottom portion of the river? would the lower/bottom portion of the river be from rood-bridge to the mouth where the tualatin dumps into the willamette?
 
Upper is from 210 bridge at sholls andup and lower is from 210 down to the mouth near the willamette. There are a lot of active fish in there. An older gentleman at the park caught about 10 large pikeminnow and a good sized bass in about 3 hours today at brownsferry dock using worms and pencil lead on the bottom. I got lots of strikes on a Yellow and red #2 blue fox spinner a good sized bass smashed it but got off. The one pike minnow I caught took the spinner as it was zigzagged back to shore on a quick turn.
 
Dairy creek??

Dairy creek??

I'm just trying to find the best stretches of river to fish for big cats. Dairy creek? I grew up fishing dairy creek... You used to be able to fill a crawdad trap in about an hour on a gopher but.....sadly, all of the pollutants from a certain nursery killed off almost the whole river system. They caught it, but dairy cr <<<<aaargh! can't stand it!>>> dairy crick is still very much in the regrowth stage right now.

Silverblade said:
I certainly don't claim any familiarity with the Tualatin itself, my "back yard" stream was Dairy Creek and a small stream running into it a ways out of Banks. I caught some good sized throut (and this was in the late 70's to be sure!) out of both streams, but none were searuns as far as I could tell - or at least their cutthroat colors were in full bloom if they were. Honestly, I am not sure how you tell the difference except that closer to salt water the searuns tend to be much more silver and less colorful. Guess they 'could' have been searun fish though, as could the ones you're talking about. My only point really is that the system used to have a good population of native inland cuts - and good sized ones too at that.

As for smolts I beg to differ. :) I know how to tell the difference between a cut and a smolt, a rainbow (usually stocked) and a cut, etc. Most of the smaller trout I used to catch were cuts until a bit later, when they used to stock the creek with rainbows. I do remember getting smolts at times, and in fact remember chasing around a salmon in the little creek bordering our property. That fish had to come up a long ways to get there, in retrospect I am very glad it escaped me.
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Silverblade said:
Hold on, TRUCE!!! :cool: FIRST I was in high school and back then there wasn't an issue with keeping fish, even so I frequently let them go. 2nd they were legal to keep if I'd wanted to, and the ones I did were bleeding badly out the gills or what not and would have died - so I decided to keep them.

Second, they could be residents as crawfish have the carotene needed to make meat orange/pink. Of course it depends on their diet and in any case I fully admit I am not certain they weren't sea run, just don't think so.

Finally I wasn't arguing, and I appologize if it seemed that way. I was hoping that through and exchange of information we could determine what the fish were. If it seems like I was questioning your integrety then it wasn't meant to.

Hopfully I've cleared the proverbial water here - please don't get high and mighty with something done 20+ years ago AND fully legal by the regulations. If I did it today then I'd derserve it and I catch and release most fish even if I don't have to.
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Well I saw this randomly searching on line. So Im an old schooler Tualatin River, Willamette kid. I know longer live in Oregon but my BEST memories of my childhood are on the T river. In the 70's there were native trout. My middle school friends and i probably fished that river more than anyone I had ever met. Maybe we came close at least! We caught borderline 1000's of fish through my childhood. We spent countless days, all day, week after week, month after month, sometimes all night long making fires, eating fish, and fearing beaver. All this without supervision in a day when it was safe for kids to fish alone. I think that is what made is so magical as a kid. I remember many times coming home with a 5 gallon bucket of pan fish, cat fish, and bass. When we weren't fishing, we were rafting on little rafts, or just floating the thing in nothing but a lifejacket. I know. I was a different day. ha.

Two things:

First: Back then you kept every fish if it was edible. And when you're a 10 yr old kid in the 70's regs were not what they are today. And, no one ever really cared if you fished in their front yard, and ate what you caught.

Second: We caught trout. Cuts, not allot of them, but consistently. We knew the difference between trout and smolt. When the smolt were in numbers we would catch countless numbers of them and let them go for fun. We knew where the trout were, what runs held them, and we named a couple of them. And if you were the one to catch one, you had bragging rights until the next guy caught one. And we caught a few nice ones.

So, am I wrong. To settle discussion just get online and see what native fish the T has had historically. If the fish and game say Trout never lived their... well... then as a kid... we ate a few delicious 12-14 inch Salmon. My bad.

Best years of my life.

d
 
Old thread.

But back in the 90's, I'd go with friends and hit up the Scholls area in a POS little motorboat (and sometimes bank fish a "secret spot" on private property).

We'd catch some very large cuts. Some up to probably 18-20". And they generally have weird lesions and roundworms and stuff, so they always went back. But we always caught. I think they're more of an upper-river fish, since I rarely see them here in the Tigard area (I know they migrate from the Willy up the Toilet, but I don't think they stay in the lower river long -- too warm.
 
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