Excellent...................
My most memorable steelhead was a 12 to 13 pound native hen that decided to come out and play on the Puyallup river many moons ago. It had been very cold for several weeks(mid twenties).......My old fishing buddy and I had all but given up on catching anything, but since we had a window of non freezing temperature and absolutely beautiful river conditions, we decided to stick it out and fish for a couple of more casts. The previous week we had found a stretch of river that held some huge suckers(3 to 4 lbs) so we decided to rig up with some small cheaters and full nighcrawlers and catch a few of these bottom feeder's and stretch our lines. Back then we had some Incredible early season hatchery fish with some even better Nate's thrown in by the mid to latter parts of January.By mid February we would have some decent numbers of native fish thrown in to the mix to really shake things up.But with the cold temperatures that year, things had really been slow.We caught several of these "scrap fish' then all of a sudden my line went out of control.I had a player on the end of my line that was peeling line off faster then anything we had experienced in weeks.....I was using an old 5-6 weight fly rod with 6 lb. line with an old Mitchell 300 reel(that my grandfather had given me) and this fish was coming unglued,tail dancing,head over heels and heading strait for the tail out of this stretch of river. For any of you that Know this river ,this was the stretch of river above the old Anton's restaurant,just above the bridge........This was always a great piece of water way back then,especially when the temperatures had been cold for extended periods of time. To make a long story short,I finally managed to bring this fine specimen to hand after an unbelievable battle.My leg was shaking with nervous energy for quite some time as this was the most incredible steelhead that I had hooked to date.
This memory will always be special to me for several reasons........Home river,The stretch of river,Tackle used,Shared with a special fishing partner.
Not the biggest fish ever but definitely the best!
Thanks for starting this thread Andrew..Brings back some incredible memories.
FE.............
