The first rise was surprising. There are trout in this run that give a skated dry fly a tussle that raise your heart rate but put no bend in the spey rod.
Still, you have to give every rise it's due and shuffle back up a few steps to re-offer.
The second rise displaced enough water to make me think.....maybe.
It's dramatically early in the calendar for steelhead on the rivers that aren't adjacent to the ocean. You can sit and stare at dam counts and tell yourself that the 50-80 fish a day over Lower Granite, but the odds are not in the favor of catching
It's really hard to step back up and wait a minute or two before you offer again. Standing in the river, all I wanted to do was cast but experience tells me .....settle the hell down, give it time
The first cast through the bucket and all doubt of what it was was quickly erased when the fish slashed and became connected to the bug. Right away it was evident that this was going to be a hell of a show and 2 full jumps later, we settled right in and duked it out. She added 2 more sky dotting jumps for good measure to let me know what was up.
Ole Murphy showed up and my reel's drag stopped functioning almost altogether, but with luck and help from the big man upstairs, the fish came to hand......
That time you spend with a wild fish is special. You only have a few brief moments to examine the beauty, stamp it into your mind and let it go. It's in that moment that the gong show of landing a big fish stops and you get lost in why you get up so early, stay so late and cast hundreds of times without any response.
With grace the hen swam off and so deepened my love for everything steelhead...
No comments:
Post a Comment