Salmon River Steelhead

I must be getting older, because never before had my hand been numb from just a couple of days of hard fishing.  The skin on my right thumb and forefinger was chapped and cracked, and the cracks had filled with the oil and grime that is an inevitability of days afield in the mountains in early spring.  The same grime filled the crevices and spaces of the cork handle on my favorite flyrod, though those deposits are the result of many trips and days and hours of chucking line laden with lead and weighted flies.  Many people go fishing to relax, but I had only just reached my zen, after two and a half days with no steelhead.  I had hooked a couple whitefish, validating that I hadn't forgotten how to drift a nymph and detect a strike, validating I wasn't a worthless fisherman.  The steelheading had been so slow, I was ready to try anything.  Normally we drift big black stonefly nymphs trailed by an egg pattern for these late season fish, but I decided to try a mix of swinging and drifting a gaudy purple articulated fly one of my technicians had tied up for me.  Swing, dead drift, swing, dead drift, swing... nothing, but the day was bright and clear, the air smelled like spring, and I was standing in the Salmon River with my Pop, so I was content.  Maybe that is what the river gods needed... my contentment... because that is when my indicator stopped and slipped beneath the surface in the way that only happens when a fish strikes the fly.

I set the hook hard: not the way you do when you are frustrated and anxious about the fishing, but rather the way you do when you know it is "fish on."  The way the fish came with the fly as I set the hook, I was convinced I had hooked another whitefish, and I declared such to Pop, who was re-rigging his gear on the bank behind me.  Almost immediately, the fish pulled harder, and I saw its bright red stripe.  "No! It's a steelhead!," I declared.  The fight was on, but the battle was short lived.  Spring steelhead like that one have already had a long journey - some 850 miles from the ocean, and the fish hadn't fed in several months.  The energy stores it had been surviving on had almost been depleted, and there wasn't much left in the tank for epic battles with flyfisherman.  The hen, on the small size for a steelhead at 23 inches, had an adipose clip, which meant she was born in a hatchery and was destined for a grill or smoker.  I dispatched the fish and cut her gills. The thick red blood flowed down a rock at stream's edge and diffused and disappeared into the flow of the river.  I imagine that blood was a microcosm of the diffusion of the waters of this river as it moves toward the ocean, first mixing with the major forks of the Salmon River, then the Snake, then almost washed away in the Columbia.

One of the other members of our fishing party, Jim, had come downstream to watch the battle, and he offered me a congratulatory cigar.  Jim and I sat on the bank in the Salmon Country sun watching the swirls of pungent smoke drift downstream, while Pop gave it one last try.  This wasn't my first steelhead, or the biggest.  It was certainly the hardest-earned fish of my life, but that sense of relaxation I had after a great trip with great friends in beautiful country made me feel like I hadn't worked all that hard for it in the end.

A hard-won steelie and a contented angler.

Enjoying the finer points of a boys' fishing trip with Paul.

Pop soaking up some spring sunshine in some of the finest country in the world.