Weekend full of steelhead
While running back from Minnesota I checked the river flows and noticed that they all bumped up to perfect levels. Friday I took a coworkers husband out for steelhead and it didn't take long to tie into my first fish. Since Tony is brand new to steelheading I let him reel it in on my Raven Tackle 14' IM8 rod and Matrix fully ported reel. In the first spot we ended up getting 3 fish and in the second spot Tony finally hooked and landed his own steelhead! Saturday I ran a full day trip which started off extremely slow but as soon as the sun popped out it was game on. Despite loosing a few fish my client still ended up landing two fish and since he didn't want to fish alone he told me to start drifting and I ended up with two as well. Sunday I ran a half day and the morning started out fast and furious except for my client couldn't keep any of the first four fish buttoned up. But he was having a lot of fun learning how to Wallace cast and due to his inexperience with a centerpin missed a tank of a steelhead. A little while later while drifting beads he hooked up with a spunky buck steelhead that was kind enough to spend more time out of the water than in. He told me that just seeing that fish come out of the water made his week. After the trip was done I decided to stick around the rest of the day with a buddy and we ended up landing a couple more fish in the rain and lost quite a few. Monday I went back to the river (instead of putting up my ice gear) and despite a late start I still ended up landing three, missing two and an old timer I fished with missed one while I was fishing with him but laid into the fish after I left to hit another river. Once on the second river I decided to pull out the fly rod and for some reason could NOT keep fish buttoned up until I was on my way back to the truck. I saw one female steelhead on gravel with three bucks behind her. I switched up to a single chartreuse egg pattern and she moved close to three feet off of the bed to take the egg. Overall this weekend was a blast and it looks like tomorrow will be the last day of fishable water seeing the forecast is calling for a ton of rain.
