Epic Oregon RV Fishing adventure

[caseyjholmes]

Told you I’d be back on December first, slaying huge fishes with my RV.
About to make good on that promise.
Enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJZJs8kzrrA
-TJ

[EL JEFE]

Man, that was.....Nice! Thanks for sharing your experience. I hope to do the same one day soon!

It would be cool if you could share some details about the trip....

Truck model, trailer model
Miles traveled
Routes taken
Places camped and fished
Etc.

[DarkShadow]

Oh snap!

A TJ sighting.

[caseyjholmes]

Truck is my new 2020 F-250 XL crew cab FX4 4x4 equipped with BFG KO2 34” tires.
Trailer is a heavily heavily modified 2020 East to West Della Terra with a $1000 toilet and a $5000 solar system.
There is tons and tons of other mods on the trailer like rod holders and peg boards for the drones, inverters for the synthesizers etc etc etc. $100,000 rig, no joke. Just spent 8 months building it.

Location was Northern Oregon coastal runoff rivers. There’s a ton of them with salmon and steelhead like that. A huge bible of regulations to go along wit it.

The fish were shooting spermies on me. First time for everything.
Released them all to fight again.

That was my first legit salmons. I’m pretty sure one or two of them were steelhead as well. Hard to tell..
still learning the fish in Oregon.

[caseyjholmes]

I’m now looking for a piece of land to call my own.
I’ll stash my off grid trailer there, build a trailer cover, a shed, a fence.. get some farm animals and make a garden.
Screw this crazy societal type stuff. I’m a fisherman who likes to be off grid in the forest.

[caseyjholmes]

Right now I’m in Lake Havasu on the BLM lands with all the other trailers, rent and electricity are free and my only bills are water and dump. About to be heading around Arizona and Cali in the RV in a few days, once I get some chores done. It’s definitely epic getting to fish the coastal waters of Florida, and then packing up and driving to Oregon to fish out some monster native mutant trouts lol

Specially during this crazy pandemic nonsense.
These may be once in a lifetime trips I’m doing now. Fully soaking that up and enjoying every second of it.

How often do you get to go build synthesizers in the forest and then use them to create music for the amazing fishing videos you just took of the fish you caught and drone videos of your trailer all in the same day?

I might add, those fish are CRAZY hard fighters. One of them took five minutes to land and I broke several more off. I’m only using eight lb line and I’m pretty sure I lost a fish about fifteen pounds. It’s on video.
When you see a fish that big in the water, it’s water bigger when you pull it out. That was a BIG BIG salmon lol. He jacked me for my lure.

Only reason I stopped catching fish was because I kept losing my lures.
I lost about ten of those #4 gold vibrax.

I’m not even using the right rods for these fish. I’m using a 6’ crankbait stick because it won’t let them go after they are hooked. I need to be using an 11’ Steelhead rod but I don’t have one. It’s hilarious how hard the fish work me on a 6’ crankbait stick but holy **** the fight is unreal. I’m running up and down the creeks when I hook one of these, trying to land them. They roll and break you off on rocks and sticks and logs. They’re very smart. Not stupid. You can see the one I broke off start rolling and thrashing real hard. These fish are no joke.

I haven’t hooked one on my 8wt fly rod yet but I’m trying. This is big water with heavy cover. Hard with a fly rod.

This trip I hooked 7-8 fish. I only landed like 4 of them. I got broken off by big huge salmon that I was not equipped to land. I literally showed this happen in the video lol

You can see the huge fish with red sides come to the surface and splash his trail at me. Then he dove dove dove and my drag screamed screamed screamed and then Snap! He was goneee

Putting the little shimano curado 70HG to work!!

Probably better I lost the fish. Fighting 15lb fish on 8lb line will tire out and kill the fish if you play it out that long.
If you’re going to be releasing the fish you need to try and land them fast.

[caseyjholmes]

All the salmon and steelhead guys use braid.
I find fluorocarbon to have a much better effect at getting down deeper to the fish in the fast water quicker.
Braid hangs around on the surface and goes upstream with backwater tides.
You want line that sinks and goes downstream well. All you have to do after that is attach the magic lure and wiggle it here and crank it there.

Lots of salmon and steelhead guys out there not catching anything. They need the special lure and some good line and a rod with backbone but a soft tip.

Make sure if you you go to Oregon, you study the rules well.
Tons and tons of overlapping rules. It’s taken me a few months to determine weather or not I’m allowed to catch those fish there. I am. But I’m still not sure weather or not I can take a salmon. I can take a Steelhead, but the salmon isn’t clear.
So I release everything. Better this way, there is more to catch when I return.

A misplaced poacher could do some real damage back there. I’d encourage ya’ll to do the same ;)

I should add that it’s clear I can take hatchery steelhead, but obviously all the fish in my video are wild/native. Another reason I am not keen to take any.