Tag 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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Deschutes steelhead & Yakima trout

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It had been a few years since I’d taken a fishing trip thanks to illness but in the spring I signed up for this trip figuring I’d be back to 100% be fall.  Well, I wasn’t quite to 100% and had some doubts just weeks before the trip but decided to go for it figuring the worst that could happen is that I flared up and had to be boated back to the car early, at least there was an option for that with this trip.  Jeff decided to come out to join me since we hadn’t fished together since Miami and the Keys back in February 2013.

The trip was a hosted Gink + Gasoline trip organized by Louis Cahill who I met at South Andros back in 2011, was it really that long ago?    The guide service was Jeff Hickman’s Fish the Swing and they seemed ready to deal with my diet and the possibility of an early evacuation if needed.   The plan was to use jet boats to head to camp up the lower Deschutes and then fish split days from a single camp instead of floating the river like we did back in 2008.

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