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 24 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