We moved into the Puget Sound area in the summer of 1977, and that winter my old man and I took up steelhead fishing. He had done it several times in the Klamath River.

The technique of choice there was casting #30 HotShots and retrieving them, so that was his plan around here.

My first day was mid-March, 1978. I was 7 years old. We went out to the Skykomish, and since he wasn't sure if I was going to be up for casting all day, he set me up with a pyramid sinker and a spin-n-glo.

I casted it out about 20 feet, and he turned and walked away to start casting himself...and by the time he got ten feet away I was hooked up. I drug the middlin' size fish right up on the bank in about ten seconds, and while he wrestled with it the line broke and it flopped back in the water. That was my first cast steelhead fishing.

It was also the only fish we hooked that day.

The next day we took our rowboat down what became my #1 steelhead stream for several years...the Sammamish River. We put in at Marymoor Park, and floated down to what used be "60 Acres"...all the soccer fields. We would float along and cast #30 HotShots.

On that, my second day, I hooked another fish casting that HotShot with a 6'6" AbuGarcia spinning rod combo...trout rod and Mitchell 300, with 6# line.

After a remarkably long fight with a hundred lucky turns, the fish was in the net...my first steelhead on my second day of steelhead fishing.

I'll dig up a pic of it some day. It was 40# long and a two tone snow belly.

I was 17 before I caught another one that big, and there were a LOT of steelhead caught in those ten years...and a LOT of them came from the Sammamish River, pre-Herschel days.

When that run ended...man, it just ended.

Was lucky enough to catch fish in the Green, Puyallup, Nisqually, Stilly, Snoqualmie, Sky, all the rest of the Snohomish Tribs, the Sauk and Skagit, even in the Wenatchee (including Nason Creek )...before I ever even ventured out to the OP...there wasn't much need for it, Puget Sound was loaded in the 70s and was even better in the 80s.

Fish on...

Todd