bugcaster wrote:

"Peter Charles" wrote in message
...
FINALLY, I wet a line.

Blustery, cold, swirling winds -- oh ya, nice day.

I wanted steelhead,

Describes the latest trip to the Deschutes. I did not see anyone hook up,
but later learned that a few had caught fish on the same day.

What section did you fish?

I went to the Siletz last Sunday with a friend from Corvallis. No
steelhead, though each of us had one brief hook-up. We weren't skunked
though; each of us also caught a single sea-run cutthroat, both of them on
Caballeros. A twenty-one incher for my friend (his largest ever), and a
13-incher for me. What lovely bright fish they are!

Oddly, one of the most fun parts of the day was spent looking down off a
bridge watching a group of drift fishermen work a deep pool full of
chinook. They caught 2 in the half hour we watched. There were maybe a
dozen people (a couple of families and a few single guys) along a 30-foot
stretch of gravel bar, with 4 or 5 lines in the water. It was a quiet
friendly communal activity, with no sense of "combat fishing." Looked
like a whole lot of fun, actually. The fish were much brighter than I had
expected, too, that far upstream. Several dozen fish were spawning in a
flat just upstream, and I'd seen a half dozen decomposing carcasses just
downstream, but the fish taken from that pool had only a touch of darkness
to them.

JR