Our Outdoors: Silver Linings, Part II

Having swallowed hard on the agony of defeat after watching my first fish of the day bolt down toward the waters of Gitche Gumee, my brother and I moved up the shore in search of more excitement. His first trip had started off much like my early adventures on the north shore had – full of wind, sleet, and lost fish.

We relocated beneath a set of falls to work a run and a deeper pool. The sun shone more frequently and we approached the area with renewed confidence. I waded to the far side and my brother, with a change of socks and drier boots, worked a drift setup on his spinning rod through the foam line on the near side. I flipped my offering out into the run, guided it behind the red and gray boulders and into the little pockets I hoped would hold fish.

The pines on the bank, some sixty feet in height, swayed with the gusts of wind overhead. Their bases of thick branches spared us the chill and allowed us to soak up the sunlight beaming down from directly overhead. We drifted the run for half an hour with no luck and then moved up toward the deep pool.

Having never used a fly rod, my brother asked if he could try mine. Explaining to him that it wasn’t a typical fly-fishing set up, I showed him how to present the monofilament drift rig. There was no traditional ten-to-two cast, but rather a flip of the rod-tip with a roll cast into the current, and a following of the split shot as it bumped around in the flow. It had taken all of last spring for me to get used to it.

Giving him the rod, I waded back to the far side of the river with the camera to take some pictures. The sun shone down on the clear water and my brother was lost in the observation of his drifting line. I snapped a few photographs of him methodically working the seams as if he’d done it all his life. I closed the camera lens and walked back down the bank. As I did, I saw the rod bounce and bow in my brother’s hands.
“I’ve got one,” he shouted from across the stream.

Of course I should have expected it, knowing my brother’s luck. On his first cast with the fly rod, he had hooked into a north shore trout, which quickly realized it was in trouble and dug deep into the pool. I entered the role of coach and net man, minus the net I had forgotten back home, and began formulating a plan to direct the fish into shallow waters and execute a hand landing. I instructed Ben to back into the shallows, where the fish could be landed with a carefully timed grab. The fish rolled to the surface, beaming silver with the slightest hint of pink and then bulldogged back into the depths.

As the fish made run after run, I instructed my brother to let the old fly reel spin and to keep tension with the palm of his hand. For a novice, he executed the battle perfectly. His rod tip stayed high, as did the tension in the line. After withstanding five minutes of powerful charges, my brother was able to direct the fish toward the pool’s edge. Wetting my hands, I reached down into the shallows and the fish lazily rolled into my grasp. I readied the camera and snapped pictures of the Simonson family’s first steelhead.

High-fiving after a successful release, I pointed out that what he had done was something that still eluded me and seemed that only those with years of experience did regularly. We stood in the trickle of water, replayed the fight and estimated the size of the fish at around 22 inches. Handing over my fly rod, he enlightened me on the finer points of steelhead fishing, laughed, and went back to his spinning rod.

As the afternoon progressed, my brother hooked into three more fish, landing one of them, a 17-inch kamlooper. Not only had he caught his first steelhead, but also his first ‘looper, giving him the two main spring species anglers look for on the north shore. I chalked it up to beginner’s luck combined with my brother’s mojo.

The sun peaked through the pines and leafless spring aspens as it made its trek toward the evening skies. I prepared to end my day fishless on the north shore as usual, but happy that my brother had met with such success. I flipped my offering into the water one final time and traced the movement with my rod tip. Suddenly, I didn’t feel the rig, only the sensation of dead weight.

I pulled up on the rod and it buckled hard. The knob on the whirring fly reel hit my knuckles as the fish ran. I could tell it was big, and from his vantage point, my brother confirmed it was the biggest trout he had ever seen – even bigger than my lost kamlooper. As the minutes wore on, the fish made countless runs, never tiring, never losing the advantage of the swift river around it. Over and over again, it would come shallow, in a streak of silver and metallic pink, as if to wink at me, and then teasingly charge back into the flow. As the runs subsided, the fish seemed to voluntarily swim to-and-fro just a few feet in front of me, as if to say, “Alright, I’ll let you win this one.”

My brother gently clasped the fish around the tail and under its belly and lifted it to me. And there it was, beaming in the late afternoon sunlight, my first steelhead.

Five trips to these tributaries spread out over two springs filled with snow, wind, rain, sleet, numb toes and frozen fingers culminated in this one fish, born of the very water I stood in. And for the first time in my adventures along the north shore, the sunlit scales of a steelhead became my silver lining…in our outdoors.

Photo:  The author prepares to release his first steelhead back into a north shore tributary.