JkbWorld

With 2009 drawing to a close, and still no steel on his 2009 tag, there were mere hours left for Jeff to get a steelhead.  After getting inspiration from another ifisher’s mega-hen caught yesterday, Jeff hit the banks of the river with fishing pal, Mitch (of Kevins Driftboat) in the pouring rain at sunrise for one last chance at winter chrome glory in 2009.  Obviously from the pic above, we pulled it off.  Read on:

Since 2010 has been unofficially dubbed the “Year of the Jig“, we were armed to the teeth with jigs of all shapes, colors and sizes, and covered a lot of water with them–sort of the jig warm-up for a hot 2010.  We had been skunked twice floating jigs at this same spot in the past 7 days, so we had our spinning and drift gear along as well for reinforcements.  Several hours in to the trip, with the rain reminding us what it means when an Oregon weather forecast says “100% chance of precipitation”, i.e. varying from hard to very hard, we started thinking that we’d end 2009 on a down note.  Mitch paused for a moment when his jig hit a rock and went down–Hold up!  That’s no rock, FISH ON!  Mitch got the party started.  The steelhead hen played a chess match to the death with Mitch’s light leader, the snags and the slippery rocks.  Mitch got her close enough to the bank to safely land.  I got the assist by popping her up onto the bank to seal her fate.

I had been alternating between my drift gear and float gear all morning, but with Mitch getting the rally started, I committed to the float gear and put my drift gear aside.  I had a jig that looked fishy as heck, so I tossed that, promptly snagged up and broke off at the knot and had to retie my whole rig.  This time, I went to the bench, and pulled out my old pal, the pink worm and rigged him up for some cold December action.  I worked my way back upstream through a fishy-looking seam full of rocks, didn’t snag or hit any of them, so I knew I was well off the bottom.  My next cast took the pink worm back through that same stretch, and something from the depths took that worm and headed for the ocean!  I was kind of caught by surprise, like “holy crap, did my float just hit a rock?”, and gave the rod a yank, and that winter steelhead hen on the other end gave it a yank right back, and it was game on!   I worked the fish back in toward the bank as Mitch made a video with his phone (if he posts it, I’ll link it below), while the fish made a few mighty runs, but in the end, I was victorious, as this trophy shot testifies!

Yeah, I know, Mitch has the posing for the trophy shot down.  I was just REALLY glad I broke off earlier and retied my gear, I probably would have pitched my rod into the river if the line broke on one of the steelie’s runs for freedom and I lost the fish!  (Note to self:  Retie the float gear once in a while!)

My steelhead was about 28 inches, while Mitch’s was about a half inch to an inch longer, and as you can see by the pic above, just a tad brighter, too–cookie cutter hatchery brat steelies and when we cut them open…

GOLD!!  Nice steelhead eggs!  I’ve got them out in the garage drying out to cure for bait.  We’ll see how they do in a later post!

Anyway, that’s the post for today, and right now, I can’t think of a better way to close out 2009!

The End

This entry was posted on Friday, January 1st, 2010 at 12:57 am and is filed under Fishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.