Nothing gives you more confidence to catch fish than catching fish. Steelheading is a game of confidence and all the rest of the bullshit is a distant second. After the single best day of steelheading that day that I had ever experienced, I was now confident.
Driving back through Canada, I was excited for the final leg of my journey. I had now been on the road for the better part of two months. I met up with my good friends from Oregon who drove north as I headed south down the Alaska Highway. After a couple days of good fishing for surface- oriented steelhead, we found a spot that seemed to be more productive than others and did not have grizzly bears on every corner. On the first day, my buddies hit several fish on sink tips but I stuck with a skater as that had done well earlier in the trip. I came to a very shallow run that had some slight visible depressions. First cast, maybe 15 feet of line out. Wow, that looked like a fish just followed my fly. Second cast, there he is. Damn, he's off. Many casts later. Nothing. Time to switch to subsurface fly. Hobo Spey had been crushing all trip. First cast. He's on. He's off. Many more casts went unanswered.
After a long night sleeping in our cars and avoiding bears, we headed back upriver for the second day. We hit a couple really good fish in the morning in one tailout that seemed to have fish pour in every evening, but that one curious fish upstream was intriguing me. As we moved upriver, I came across the same spot and could feel the same fish was there. First cast with a small marabou fly. Grab. Second cast. Grab. Third cast. Grab or the bottom, not sure. Then silence. We went upriver for a while and hit a couple hot Canuck-style steelhead. On the way down, all three of us took our shot at the grabby fish that we had named Curious George. He did not come out to play.