Friday morning Scott Brow and I headed down to the clearwater river at 4:30 am, jet boat in tow.  We arrive to a miserable wet day with temps in the lower 40′s.  The river is not nearly as crowded as we had expected.  By the time we hit our second run both of us have had fish on….both lost.  So we work our way up the river stopping at all our favorite spots that don’t have people in them.  By two o’clock we finally land our first fish on the trip.  It was a 31″ hatchery hen.  No more fish were taken that day.

On Saturday we tried our luck on the Lower Snake.  We launched the sled at Hell’s Gate and ran all the way up to the Ronde stopping  in-between to fish.   The first run we stopped at provided Adam with a sweet little 4lb wild fish.  As we ran up river we hooked 4-5 more and landed a few of those.  By mid afternoon we were tired of all the big boats beating up the water so we decided to head back down river in hope of finding some quite water to fish.  We finished the day at the same spot Adam had caught his fish.  I decided to go through first with a dry.  This turned out to be a great idea.   About half-way through I landed my first wild steelhead on a dry fly.  It has created a new monster inside of me.  Seeing the 8lb, chrome, wild hen come up and sip the dry stopped my heart… then heavy pressure on the end of my line told me that she was hooked.

We decided to head back the Clearwater on Sunday to finish out our three days.  This time the weather was a little better and the river was up about 500 cfs.  We ended up hooking 4 and landing two that day.  The biggest was around 33″.  It was a great trip and I always  fun swinging flies with friends stopping to drink some beer every once and a while….  Some new friends were definitely made.