North 40 Fly Shop eMagazine December 2016 | Page 24
ANY CAST
STORY BY: JOE O’BRIEN
Some lessons, for the steelhead fisherman, are
learned only through keen observation, while
others are delivered like a backhanded slap across
the face. One lesson, which resonates in my mind
nearly every time I set foot into a run that has the
possibility of holding a steelhead, came in the form
of the latter.
It was a bright, windy, late summer day on a world
class steelhead river. I had the good fortune of
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spending the day with close friends, searching for
the ultimate prize of a steelhead encounter. We
chose a large piece of water where we could all fish.
As I approached the last good bit of water in the
run, the difficulty of casting a long floating line
into a head on, gale-force wind began to outweigh
my desire to finish it off. Another poor cast had
me looking upstream for my friends. One friend
responded with, what would be, a critical fist pump