I am very proud of my brother, Seth. He is genuinely one of the most talented steelhead fishermen that I know. He ties perfect flies, builds flawless rods, and grids out steelhead runs like an excel sheet. However, Seth, who we call Stealth, has been on a four-year journey trying to catch a 20-pound steelhead. It started back in 2013 when we did a float together down our favorite river. Honestly, I still feel kind of guilty because I was taking my time floating down to a really nice piece of water when an older fisherman steps out on the gravel bar in front of us and caught a 20-pound steelhead. I was so frustrated with myself if I would have just pushed down river 10 minutes earlier that would have been our fish. Anyways, this whole experience led to Stealth’s radical pursuit of some very big and very elusive wild fish. Later in that same day, I broke off an upper teens steelhead, “man was I frustrated.” So, fast forward to the next year and Seth comes out from Oregon to hunt his trophy steelhead and gets blanked after three days of fishing, not even a tug. Skip to the following year on the very last day in the cold morning he has a monster wild buck swing up the river with his fly in the same run he watched the old guy land a 20 pounder two years earlier. He explained “the eat” to me as “I heard two clicks come off of my Hardy, felt the line tighten and go up steam, then it just went limp”. How bazaar is that, well, not as unusual as we thought for big wild fish to swim upstream in the soft inside bucket of a run when the river is just above freezing levels. To make matters worse I saw the giant roll.
Now, the Stealth is furious and determined as ever to catch his fish. So in the offseason, he builds a beautiful Meizer 8WT 12’6 Spey Rod, ties up two dozen custom winter steelhead tube flies, and buys a reel called, “The Tank.” Stealth wasn’t messing around. To make the scenario even more dramatic he decides to drive 6 hours in a rainstorm to the OP and wait two days for the river to drop into shape before he could fish.
With only a day and a half to fish and the river just starting to drop we decided to take the boat down one of our favorite sections of the river. Halfway way through the day we pulled over to a nice gravel bar to swing flies and have lunch. It was Seth’s turn to make lunch, but he couldn’t get the BBQ started, so I told him to swing flies and I would cook the hot dogs. Ten minutes later I had some very hot dogs ready to eat and yelled to Stealth, “The Dogs Are Ready”, two seconds later his line when tight, the earth shook beneath his feet and the water exploded 20 yards in front of him as a huge wild fish grabbed his fly. The obese giant skimmed across the surface of the water on his massive belling proposing like a dolphin. The fish was so chunky that it couldn’t jump out of the water it just kind of flopped and burned off large sections of line from Seth’s reel. After a tremendous fight, we landed the beautiful wild buck and Stealth had done it, he had persevered and was given the just reward.
