Gone Fishin'

Hello everyone. My name is Adam Warr. You probably know me better as "Susannah's husband" and if you follow this blog, you may have even seen a few pictures of me. Today I'm honored to be writing my first unassisted, unadulterated, and undulating (?) blog post. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did creating it.

For my birthday this year, my family gave me the means ($) to go on a guided Steelhead fishing trip. I've gone Steelhead fishing a few times, but never with a guide. I've only gone with people who said they knew what they were doing, but didn't. So even though I've always wanted to catch a Steelhead, I vowed to never to go Steelhead fishing again unless it was with someone who really knew what they were doing and had the track record to prove it.

For those of you who don't know what a Steelhead is, it's basically a rainbow trout that goes out to sea for a few years, hits puberty, and comes back home to make babies.



Here's a snippet on the Steelhead life cycle. Unfortunately, there were a few of the steelhead that weren't able to make it back to their spawning grounds yesterday because I decided to skip school and do a little fishin' yesterday.



I went up on the Clearwater river with my friend, Brandon Ritchie. He'd gone out on a guided trip last year and had a blast doing it. We ended up booking the same guide that he went with last year. Here's a picture of Brandon and our guide, Bryan, who looks just like my brother, Jared. Bryan was a fantastic guide who worked hard paddling up and down the river all day long to get us to the fish.



I knew it was going to be a good day when I landed this little gal on the first cast!





Three hrs later, with no bites to speak of, I was starting to wonder whether I'd caught the only fish in the river. So started snapping some pics of the Clearwater's scenery. It was a beautiful day, but there were some early morning showers that left us chilled to the bone pretty much all day.



Fish number 2 came in the early afternoon. I think she was right around 34 inches. A little shorter now that she's in my freezer.



I think Brandon was starting to get worried that he might not catch one, so he got a picture with her, too.



We discovered that Brandon's fears were ill founded when he landed this big bull. At 36 inches, it was the biggest catch of the day.



This was catch #3 for me. I had the option of keeping it, but doing so would have put me at my limit and I wouldn't be able to fish the rest of the day. This was a tough call, but after doing a little WWJD analysis, I thought to myself, "Certainly He would have kept fishing." And so did I my friends. So did I!



I though that perhaps I had made a mistake as both night and our pullout spot were speedily approaching, but such doubts were unwarranted. I landed this 33 inch, 11th hour miracle just shy of our pullout destination.





All in all, we ended up with 4 beautiful keepers. A great big thanks to Susannah and the rest of the family for a great day of fishing on the Clearwater.