I fished with father and son today Chad and Mike. Right off the bat this morning they informed me they could not catch steelhead, they were both new to the sport and after several trips where they hooked fish but never landed any, they were convinced they were jinxed!
The advantage of fishing over alot of fish, that bite, is you get to make mistakes. You get to miss a few bites, you get to leave too much slack in the line, and eventually your going to get on top of things and finally land a fish. Well that's
what happened to Chad and Mike today.
We started out with a slow morning, casting and casting after fish after fish with not even a bite. About midmorning we came into a run and finally bobber down.....then bobber up! In this same drift this scenario repeated itself several times before Mike yells FISH ON! It was a nice little hatchery fish that fought well before surrendering to the net, finally they had landed a steelhead and I can't tell you what that meant to him.
We left that spot and floated into another hole that produces fish almost daily, Chad makes a cast, his float goes a few feet before disappearing from sight Mike comes back on it...FISH ON AGAIN! This fish to would put up a great fight before the net was slid underneath it. At this point it was high fives all around, Chad and Mike, father and son had come out together and successfully landed steelhead!
Heading out to fish steelhead a few times a year and going home empty handed doesn't mean you can't catch fish, like anything it takes practice, and lots of it. If you fish steelhead in January, chances are conditions will change when you come back in March, the same applies again in June, and when conditions change so do techniques, so in essence the learning curve starts over with every trip. Today all Chad and Mike needed was the chance to make some mistakes and then apply what they learned on the next opportunity until finally they put it all together and bobber down resulted in fish landed.
So with anything in life, don't let a few mistakes take away your confidence, if you head to the river convinced you can't catch fish chances are you probably won't.
