It kind of started with a phone call. Jason was coming up to fish with me again and since I've seen some BWO's popping off most days on the Trinity, I'd thought I'd give him a heads up. "You do much dry fly fishing?", I asked. "I've been seeing a pretty good hatch happening mid-day and maybe we could get a steelhead on a dry fly." "Let's do it," was his response. And thus began our two days on the Trinity. But before we talk about THAT, let's just make one thing clear: rain and steelhead go together like peanut butter and jelly. Every time it rains, the river fishes pretty well. So with each little bump, things improve. The flows were about 575-590cfs at Junction City over the two days and the color was just about perfect, colored up with what we like to call "steelhead green," though some of the creeks pumping into the Trinity are really more of a grey due to the snow melt. We had cloud cover the first day and on our second day had about half a cloudy day and half sun.

Okay, so how was the fishing? It was excellent. Our last trip together was really good and this was REALLY REALLY good. Red hot, to be exact. On our first day, the metal faces were in all of the likely spots and we had hookups throughout most of the day, from the start to the end. Most of the day I ran some form of a three fly rig that included a rubber legs, yellow stone fly, psycho prince, or pheasant tail type of fly. They were eating everything, though the smaller stuff (size 16) seemed to have the most action. The two highlights of the day were easily hooking TWO adult steelhead on a dry fly, one of which was landed (see the photos). The one that got away still ate it and it was epic to have on for a few seconds, but size 16 dry flies without barbs are not really designed to land steelhead, right? So we were just grateful for that first one! The second highlight of the day, for me, was when we got to the VERY last bucket... the VERY last run... and I told Jason, "Hey... I've never gotten a fish here but I love this spot and it looks like it should have fish in it so I'm not sure why no fish yet... let's get one here." Would you know, Jason stuck one there too. Dude is a stick... and also lucky... ha ha.

Our second day was a bit slower in that we didn't get action throughout the day but we can't complain. Steelheading is NOT a numbers game. You might throw a thousand casts and not even SEE one of those ghosts. But we still got a couple adults and they were both in the same spot. Those two fish were probably on a date or something and then Jason ruined it, ha! One of the fish was a clipper and had a $20 tag on it, so Jason will be able to find out where that fish has been and gone!

Not a bad two days. Jason swung flies on the 'ole spey rod, fished nymphs under a bobber (I mean "indicator," sorry), and played the dry fly purist card and got some grabs on top. Hard to beat days like that.