Dropped steelhead

Dropped steelhead

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
Fishing buddy Brian Oakland goes steely fishing on the Salmon River with a bunch of buddies. Wait’ll you hear this? We made this epic plan to rent a jet boat, go upriver about 30 miles. We had a couple of rafts and it was four of us and we were going to steelhead fish. We had visions of just catching native steelhead in this amazing place. We got dropped off, filled up the rafts and started fishing. And we fish and we fish still had our fish of a thousand casts, but we put in 2000 casts. 3000 casts, went through the whole first day, got into the second day. It was hard to stay motivated, but we were in a really, really cool place. On the evening of the second day, my buddy ends up catching a really, really nice 28, 30 inch chrome steelhead, absolutely beautiful. And it was a hatchery fish, so it didn't have the adipose fin on it so we could actually keep it. Everybody was celebrating super stoked, getting a picture taken As I was handling the fish for the photo, I literally ended up dropping it back into the river. The look in everybody's eyes was to kill. Couldn't believe that it just happened right before our eyes and this fish was just gone. It happened in a second. So all that hard work that everyone put in trying to stay positive and then it finally happened, caught this fish. Everybody was celebrating. And with about 10 seconds, I ended up dropping that fish back from the river. It was awful. It was embarrassing. People got over it. But yeah, I caught a lot of crap for that around the campfire that night as we were eating other things besides baked steelhead on an open fire. Speaker1: If it weren't for bad luck, there'd be no luck at all.
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