sambone
Use a snappy one-foot strip, where you flick your wrist quickly, then the pause in between strips as you reach for new line. You could count in your head "Thousand one, thousand two..." with the strip being every number and the pause being "thousand". The mass of the Clouser allows it to briefly accelerate forward and up, followed by a noticeable slow down and drop. They take on the drop and you feel them on the strip. Every now and then they will crush it on a drive-by and your line with slip through your rod fingers as your stripping hand had released line and is advancing to re-grip. Find a rhythm that works. Most importantly, keep changing the rhythm until you start getting hit. Focus on that retrieve. Maybe it's a quick three strips with a pause, maybe it's a steady strip-pause with a two-foot strip and slightly longer pause (include unlimited variations). First one-foot variation is my most productive. After many trips on many days, you will eventually find the mojo that works for you. My go-to line is an Intermediate sink (Cortland Camo rocks!) for surface to about 7 feet. If I'm fishing anything deeper than about 7 feet I also have a heavy shooting head Type VI that can get me down to the 30 foot range if necessary, although I don't often have the patience to wait for the drop to that depthI'm curious, how do you fish the Clouser? Strip it in like a streamer or let it sink and pull it in a few inches at a time? BTW, I haven't caught a smallmouth this far up river (Eugene). How far down would one need to go to start finding them? Harrisburg?
Are there small mouth bass in the Willamette in Eugene?If you just want to catch fish on a fly and don't care what's tugging...think about a simple Clouser Minnow in olive over white. The smallmouth on the Willamette crush that fly. Going sub-surface you no longer have to wait for a rise or a hatch to get action all day, rain or blazing heat. Obviously there will be variations to the bite, like any fishing, but you won't be a one-trick pony...unless you only have an olive over white Clouser.