Jed Whalen Stewart's Senior Project: Let's Catch Some Fish

I honestly don't know how I would classify the story that I am about to tell you; probably funny for everyone other then me, and actually it was funny most of the time, just slightly tramautizing in the moment. On Thursday, Kellen, Braden, and I set off to fish Milo Mcgyver Park on the lower Clackamas for a second time throughout the project. We decided to fish a different spot then we had fished earlier in the project in search of bigger fish. We fished this one riffle for about half an hour and were having all sorts of luck catching very small fish; pretty much every cast if you would let the dry fly sink a few inches below the surface, you would hook into a 3-6 inch rainbow trout. However, across the river and in a deeper pool, we saw what we were sure were some larger fish surfacing. I've built up a bit of a reputation throughout this project as being the riskiest person when it comes to precarious wading situations so it wasn't much of surprise that I walked across t...

I'm supposed to tell a story about a moment from the week but we had a multitude of fun moments occur this week. Thursday morning we woke up at 6 and met at Braden's before driving all the way out to the Coast Range to fish the Nehalem River. We drove through the rain and sung along to the lovely tunes of Olivia Rodrigo, before arriving at a spot that was pretty incredible. The river was split into lots of different holes and eddys which seemed perfect for big fish, and it looked like the rain might hold off for a while. That, it turns out, was not the case. Within twenty minutes, it had started to pour down on us, and we had all thought "oh, if we need raincoats we can just walk back up to the car and get them," so the first three minutes of rain were pretty detrimental to the dryness of the group. Then, it started to thunder. And not feeling like standing in the middle of the river holding a metal pole in a thunderstorm was a perfect situation to be in, we all went ...

For my senior project a pair of friends and I decided to undertake a Capstone Project where we decided to do all sorts of things surrounding the art of angling. We chose this project in order to learn more about fishing and practice our skills while also having fun and getting the oppoortunity to be outdoors. Our inspiration for this project was the chance to get to do something that we generally wouldn't get to do in a normal week in our lives. Fishing was something that all three of us felt would be the type of project that we would really enjoy but also get something out of, for example, the learning of new skills or chance to work with people and organizations surrounding fishing. Oh, I should probably introduce my group for the project; I'm working with Kellen Woodcock and Braden Wells, and we are being supervised by Veronica Ledoux. We pulled this Senior Project together after a few nights of brainstorming and some fairly unformed ideas, but throughout some revisions fr...