That was great and what made it even better was Daniel was using his new ultra light trout rod rigged up with 4 lb test and a small spinner! About and hour later he hooked up with another salmon about the same size on a krocodile lure on the same ultra light trout rod.
There was two steelhead hooked by one guy but that was about it going on there so we decided to head over to the McKenzie River for some steelhead. We have never fished it together so it was more of a scouting trip to find good water and maybe get lucky. We fish one area for about two hours and had a great time catching trout, about 30 fish hooked probably before we decided to head to a new spot. We fished a nice looking hole where we spotted what looked like some bigger trout and Daniel hooked one briefly and it looked like it was a steelhead! We started to walk down to the next hole and we spotted about five steelhead hanging out so we started to harass them with no luck. About a minute after throwing on a silver spinner one of the steelhead turned and chased it for about two feet then went back. Two passes later and the same fish turned and.......
FISH ON!! This was the day of the light trout rods as I was using my 6 ft, light power rod with 6 lb test. What a fight, you will see in the upcoming video episode. This was one hot fish that made me work my butt off but in the end came in. Its not the best picture but the fish had been sitting in the water and looks a bit dark. Next Daniel ties on a small rooster tail spinner and got another one to hit about a half hour later again on six pound test.
Both steelhead were 28 inches long and put up a great fight. We fish a while longer and decided to downsize and throw the micro jigs at them. It was a shallow tail end so getting a good drift with them was difficult and is very important to getting a steelhead to bite. I tied on one of the new jigs I have been working on and the two times it has been used has caught steelhead, once on the alsea at the end of the season and then on this day.
A few passes by this fish and it sucked the jig in and exploded out of the water!! This was the hottest steelhead I have fought in a long time. It ran all through the tail end then up the far bank 30 yards to the top of the hole where Daniel was fishing in a flash. I could see my line had a huge bend in it where it was and the fish was way ahead of it. It was nothing like I have ever seen and then it swam down the side of the river I was on to about five feet in front of me. I knew something was going to happen, it held there for a few seconds then exploded again this time coming about four feet out of the water and snapped my 6 lb leader like it was hair! There isn't much you can do when a fish goes crazy like that but it was fun to see, the fish appeared to be at least 10 lbs and was much larger than the ones we caught earlier. All in all we had an awesome day on the water and got to catch everything Steelhead, Salmon and Trout.
