Rain, Snow and Steelhead

Snow fell all night long and in the morning we stepped outside onto a nice crunchy blanket of snow. We were using a three-season tent, winter being the one season omitted, and it looked like it was going to cave in from the heavy, wet snow that covered it. I couldn’t believe I was staring at a white-out when just six or seven hours earlier we were eating dinner outside.

    


Ryan and I decided to knock off the snow from the tent and try and dry off what we could next to the fire we had started for breakfast. After some bacon and eggs we headed to the river to go after some more rainbows on dries. We hiked downstream and found some heavier water with swirling pockets and downed trees in the water. The first thought in both of our heads was “streamers.”

When it comes to streamer fishing my motto is “go big or go home.” I usually throw on my sinking line with some nasty jointed streamer preferably five inches or longer. On this day, however, I felt like that would probably just scare these fish so I put on a basic size-6 cone-head olive Woolly Bugger and stripped it through the fast current. Within three or four casts I was hooked up to a fish much bigger than the ones farther upstream. He put up a good fight, jumping once or twice and running up and down the narrow river until the hook slipped from its mouth.





Ryan couldn’t find a fish in this river if it jumped into his net and died. I picked up a couple nice ones later on in the day on the same Bugger. It started pouring freezing rain on us and we decided to call it early and head back to camp. We made a quick decision to break camp in the rain and head for the Deschutes and spend the night there. The Deschutes is about a two hour drive from where we were and it is in the desert part of Oregon, so we figured we had a better chance of staying dry there for the night.

There are dozens of campsites that run along the lower section of the Deschutes. If you have ever fished the Deschutes then you know it doesn’t matter where you go, there are always going to be other people, but at the same time there will always be an unoccupied spot to wet a line. This is a huge river with more than enough water for everyone.  Originally we just planned to set up camp and relax by a fire and drink some beers, but there was a fire ban in effect, so relaxing by a fire was out. We still had maybe 45 minutes of light left so we threw on our waders, rigged up the Spey rods and hit the water.

I used this opportunity to practice my Spey cast because I was new to the two-handed game. Ryan had been at it for a few months so he kind of knew what he was doing. I had three goals: make a crappy to decent looking D loop, shoot about 70 feet of line, and not stick a Green Butt Skunk in the back of my skull.

So my night went about as well as I planned, but for some reason Ryan got lucky.
“Holy shit,” he said loud enough for me to hear over the current. I looked up and saw his line shoot through the guides to the middle of the river, but just as a beautiful steelhead broke the surface, the fly line wrapped around the rod tip and snapped the top section off.
Ryan started screaming and lowered his rod, disgusted with himself that he made such a rookie mistake. I quickly realized that the steelhead still had the fly in its mouth. Ryan lifted his rod and felt tension. The fight was on.

This was insanity: A 30-inch steelie fighting for his life against an amateur steelheader working with only three of four sections of his Spey rod. What felt like two hours, but was probably more like 20 minutes, ended with me tailing the beautiful fish and taking some glory shots of Ryan and his steelhead before releasing it.

   



Our day had gone from pretty good to insanely ridiculous in a period of 20 minutes. We went back to the campsite and kicked back over some brats and beers. Why can’t every day be like this?

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Posted at 08:54 AM | Permalink

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