I knew that I wasn’t going to have to work today so the night before I called up my brother to see if he wanted to try for some steelhead by my house. I have been absolutely hammering them since the first of April and with warmer weather and higher waters, I knew that they would be moving up hard. I tied up a bunch of brown and black stone flies as well as some brown wooly bugger flies for the next days fly fishing adventure. My brother arrived at 6am and we drove around the bend to the stream that has proven to be both a blessing and a curse. We initially start at a dam that starts out the fishable portion of the stream and my brother immediately has a hookup! We hadn’t even been there for five minutes and we have a fish on. The steelhead jumped and arched through the air. I could see the fish underwater shaking its head furiously as it tried to free itself from the number 12 brown stonefly that I had tied the night before. Well after a few more jumps and twists it had almost completely wrapped itself in my brothers tippet. Finally, the inevitable happens and his line snaps. We just shrugged our shoulders and started all over again. I had a quick take and release and then my brother hooked up into an absolute monster chrome steelhead. Its head looked about as big as a basketball when it breached briefly and took off down stream and then we were off to the races. My brother had not worn his waders so he handed his pole off to me so that I could follow the fish downstream and out of the overgrown brush along the bank. We approach a crazy looking white water section where the footing got non-existent. I was about to tell my brother that I couldn’t follow it anymore because of the footing when I fell straight on my butt and into the current! It was like a scene out of A River Runs through It. I held the rod high as I slipped downstream and tried to find my footing. I finally found it but by that time it was too late. The fish had broken off on some branches and that was the end of that. Everything on me was soaked. Oh well. We re-rigged up and went a little just below the dam into the faster current and fished the tail water. The rest was a blur. It was one fish on and off for the rest of the day. I lost count of how many steelhead we battled but I do know that we only managed to land four of them (all mine!! sorry bro!). Seems like as fast as we could throw in our stoneflies and egg patterns we would have a fish on. What an unreal outing. I must say that as much as I had fun catching those chrome I don’t think that I would care to repeat that ride down the river. Well, maybe if I would have landed it!