Category Archives: Steelhead

Big K Blast & Cast

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My friend Mark and I had tried to get together for a turkey trip last season but didn’t pull it off so this year we set one up in Oregon so I could go after my first Rio Grande and he could go after his first turkey ever.  He got us booked into the Big K Guest Ranch outside of Elkton on the Umpqua River for one day of turkey hunting and one day of fishing.   I decided to fly down to Eugene instead of doing the 7 hour drive down and back and it worked pretty well since the ranch had a shuttle and I knew I could pack light for a two day trip.

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2017 – A lot of firsts!

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My seasons of 2017 – spring lake rainbows, spring turkey season, tenkara trout,  summer fly fishing, summer steelhead fishing, pheasant hunting, elk hunting, late deer season,  chukar hunting

I can hardly believe that 2017 is drawing to a close already, where did it go?   As I sit back and look over the year I realize that I have had one heck of a year with a lot of firsts.  For the first year in a while health was just not an issue, as you can tell from my lack of health related blog posts, so it freed me up to get back into fly fishing, to really get into hunting and to finally reach my goal of stocking my freezer by myself.   On top of spending almost one-third of my days in the field I was able to get out for daily hikes (and later runs) with Lira and still find time to work all year long.

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The strangest spey casting lesson I’ve ever had

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Louis Cahill Photography

How silly is this?   photo by Louis Cahill Photography

I learned to spey cast in the 90s, back in the days when spey rods were a relatively new tool in the steelheaders arsenal in the PNW.   Lines were long belly mid-spey lines back then and my initial instruction consisted of about 10 minutes of my friend showing me a single and double spey and off I went.   I watched videos on spey casting and the one I remember the most had this basic formula of Lift-Loop-Pause-Fire.   This is how I learned to cast and after some time was able to put out a lot of line and actually caught some steelhead.

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