Fished the Trinity river for steelies the past few days and man was it coooooold!We averaged about 4 fish per day and lost a few as well,mostly on size #12 golden stones,pheasant tails and one fish on my version of a red serendipity all with a bead head.The fish were all in the deeper runs with very few exeptions,and all of the fish we caught were large for Trinity standards ranging from 6 to 12 lbs.The water was 41 degrees and the outside temp was around 20 degrees making casting somewhat difficult because the line and rod eyes were frozen,our feet kept freezing to the bottom of our boat!Despite the bitter cold the trip was worth it.
I braved the cold myself this week and headed up to the Trinity for MLK day. I nearly froze my cojones off (it was about 15 degrees when we started out) and we had to break trough a sheet of ice on Rush Creek just to launch the boat, but it was well worth it! 6 Steelies on, 4 in the net, and a nice 18" Brown for my troubles...
The first two Steelies came out of Rush Creek not far from where we started off. The water was surprisingly still to hold signifigant numbers of Steelhead, but they were there. Fish #1 was obviously a spawner, it's hard to tell from the pic but there was signifigant wear on the tail and the tips of the fins:
Fish #2 managed to get my leader wrapped around it several times, and I was lucky to get it in the net:
The last fish of the day was a husky hatchery hen that juuust couldn't resist the size 10 Golden Stone that I was drifting in front of her. As you can see, she was taken from a far more traditional Steelhead run than the other two:
The prize fish of the day was a hard fighting wild male that I hooked right under thelow overhanging branches you can see just over my right houlder in the pic above. As soon as I hooked up the fish turned down stream and it was off to the races! I literally lost count of the number of strong runs he made. Even when we finally managed to get him close this fish just did not want to quit. He would swim a complete circle around the guide and I, and when we tried to net him at the end of the circuit, he would just run off again. After five or six circuits we managed to net him. When we finally got him into the net he measured over 27":