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WEDNESDAY, MAY 4, 2022
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APPEAL TRIBUNE
Miller
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Plenty of time; they’d only put in
“two or three hours.”
Fishing may be slow now, but if
you’ve been at it long enough, it stacks
up to some pretty impressive numbers,
he said.
“I’d probably put it at 700, 800
salmon and steelhead, mostly steel-
head,” O’Day said about his totals over
the years and decades at Marx-Strange.
“I think that the best (annual total) I’ve
ever done out here on salmon was 12.
And the best I’ve ever done out here
combined is like 28, 30.
“But you take that over 60 years and
it adds up to quite a few fish.”
So far this year, O’Day said he’s
hooked and landed five steelhead, but
just one hatchery fish with a clipped ad-
ipose fin that he kept.
“A nice 14-pound summer steelhead
around the 20th of (March), a 33-inch
fish,” he said. “I smoked it and gave it to
all of my friends.”
Avid anglers both, O’Day hits the Wil-
lamette River in his small boat to fish for
largemouth and smallmouth bass three
to four days a week.
And Kitchin has really gotten into
fishing for kokanee, a landlocked varie-
ty of sockeye salmon, at Detroit Lake.
And both head for the coast when
halibut and coho “silver” salmon sea-
sons open in May.
O’Day said that nostalgia was a big
factor for him at the Emil Marx-Lloyd
Strange Fishing Hole.
He was there at the beginning, and
it’s quite a fish tale.
In the beginning
“It was just a field. I mean my wife
didn’t even know about this place it was
so secret,” O’Day said. “Emil would let
maybe six, eight of us fish out here.”
That ended abruptly in 1988, O’Day
recalled.
When a fisherman, apparently
drunk, blasted down Hall’s Ferry Road
to the river doing about 60 mph, the wife
of a mechanic who lived on the road
went down and told him,
“I’d appreciate it if you’d slow down
because I’ve got some little kids,” O’Day
said. “And he told her to go F herself.
“And the next day the farmer came
down here and said, ‘You’re out of here.’
“So for two years, you could go all the
way to the end of Hall’s Ferry Road,”
work your way down to the bank and
walk along the gravel to the fishing hole.
Getting down the steep slope to get to
the bank was no problem for the young-
er, more spry regulars such as O’Day.
But the senior members of the frater-
nity such as Strange couldn’t make the
climb, and converted their efforts into
lobbying the Polk County Commission,
and its chairman, Bill Harland.
Even former Oregon Gov. Bob Straub
got involved, O’Day said.
“He was the one who helped get the
ball rolling on the Social Security Hole.
We parked up on the road up there, and
he said, ‘If any of you guys don’t mind
trespassing, we’re going to walk down
and see what this looks like.’
“So about a half-dozen of us walked
down right here to see what it looked
like.”
The efforts paid off. The county pur-
chased the section of the bluff and
christened it.
“And in 1990 it became the Lloyd
Strange-Emil Marx Fishing Hole,” said
O’Day.
It was a big deal, he added.
“I was here for the dedication,” O’Day
said. Straub also showed up, as did one
of Marx’s sons after Emil had died.
Excess of success
During the now-official park’s early
years, it was a tad too successful for the
small band of original anglers who were
given permission to fish from the field
next to the Willamette that became the
park.
“Back when Emil had it, there was a
half-dozen of us who would come out
and fish it anytime and get a spot to fish.
“A lot of us didn’t (cheer the park des-
ignation). We kind of liked it the way it
was, because after it became (an-
nounced), a lot of people knew about it.
“You had to get out here at 9, 10
o’clock at night to get a place to fish. I’m
serious. Of course, fishing was a lot bet-
ter back then.”
There were epic steelhead runs dur-
ing the 1980s when state hatcheries
pumped out millions of summer-run
fish.
“In 1988 we had 43,000 summer
steelhead come across (Willamette
Falls) in Oregon City,” O’Day.
Several things man-made and natu-
ral have caused declines in fish num-
bers.
Changes in both state and federal
policies to protect non-hatchery wild
runs of salmon and steelhead shifted
the emphasis from production to con-
servation.
Other factors such as changes in pat-
terns of rain and snowfall, as well as
temperature fluctuations in ocean cur-
Longtime fishing buddies Gene O’Day and Leon Kitchin swap lies and BS during a day on the Willamette River at the Emil
Marx-Lloyd Strange Fishing Hole near Independence. HENRY MILLER / SPECIAL TO THE STATESMAN JOURNAL
Getting there
What: The Lloyd Strange-Emil Marx Fishing Hole, a Polk County Park.
Getting there: From Salem, take Highway 22 west to the Independence Highway (Highway 51) turn on the left. Go just more
than 5 miles and watch for Hall’s Ferry Road on the left (Green Villa Barn is on the right). Take Hall’s Ferry 2 miles to the park
gate.
Fee: None
Hours: Sunrise to a half-hour after sunset.
On-site: Fishing, picnic tables, ADA restroom (no running water), trash cans, gravel parking lot.
rents caused by climate change also af-
fected runs.
But for the Social Security Hole, one
of the biggest hits came with the centu-
ry flood of February 1996.
The water got so high that it washed
the pea gravel off the parking lot, and
bank sloughing led to changes in where
the holes, drifts and eddies are now,
O’Day said.
The anglers who regularly fish at the
Emil Marx-Lloyd Strange Fishing Hole
figure that the honey hole fishing slot for
salmon and steelhead is now on the oth-
er side of the river.
Still, the run of spring Chinook up the
Willamette hits the area around the end
of April, and holds until the moss build-
up makes it unfishable.
And hope springs eternal in the
hearts of anglers.
There are, after all, a lot worse places
to spend your time.
“I love this place,” O’Day said after
checking his line and re-casting. “I
think it keeps me alive.”
Contact Henry Miller via email at
HenryMillerSJ@gmail.com