Gualala River

Fishing the Gualala River

The Gualala is a small steelhead river on the coast where Sonoma and Mendocino counties meet, about 130 miles northwest of San Francisco. It reaches the Pacific just south of the town of Gualala, where a sand spit holds back a tidewater lagoon below Highway 1. This page covers the last 3.5 miles, from the Iron Bridge over the North Fork down to the sea. Above the bridge, the water along Gualala River Rd is the South Fork, which has its own page. The lower river is where most people fish from the bank: gravel bars, holes, runs and riffles, with a road running up the north side. At the top, the North Fork comes in under the Iron Bridge, and North Fork Hole at its mouth holds steelhead waiting to run up that fork to spawn; in summer it doubles as a swimming hole. Just downstream are Switchville, a broad gravel bar with a dirt road onto it, then Snag Hole and Donkey Hole, where you can often spot fish from the hillside above the north bank. Thompsons Hole lies along the south side, and Miner Hole, a big hole tucked against the north bank, is the best known of the lot. Below it come Old Bridge Hole and the Race Track, with the Sonoma County Park campground on the south bank and its trails reaching upstream to most of these holes. The Highway 1 bridge crosses at Mill Bend, where a dirt road drops to a gravel bar. Below the highway the river slows into the Lagoon and ends at the spit off Gualala Point County Park. Steelhead are the reason to come. They push in from the ocean after the first big rains of fall, and November through February is the heart of the season. Early in the run, while the river is still low, the fish stay in the bottom of it, between tidewater and Switchville. In 1989 a group of local anglers working with the state's Fish and Game department, the Gualala River Steelhead Project, was eight years into releasing as many as 30,000 steelhead a year, and asked anglers to donate a live fish to the white PVC tubes staked in the shallows. Tidewater is hard to wade and fishes best from a boat with bait or lures. Upstream, roe and hardware such as the Little Cleo, Panther Martin, Corky, Spin-N-Glo and Kastmaster cover the deeper holes, but at low water many runs are too thin for lures, and that is when the fly rod earns its place. Gold Comet, Silver Comet, Fall Favorite, Boss, Skunk and Glo-Bugs are the usual flies, and the gravel bar opposite Miner Hole is a favorite spot for shooting-head lines. At several holes the deeper water lies against the far bank, so expect to wade across. Regulations change and differ by section, so check the current California regulations before you go.