I caught my first steelhead in 1973 on the Elks property on Mill Creek on the south side of Shelton.

I had a big red and white Dardevle spoon on an old Wright McGill yella rod with a Mitchell 300 spinning reel. I'll never forget the sight of that huge tail coming out of the water when I hooked that fish.

Whatever line I had on that rod deserves a gold medal because it went through abuse over the next couple minutes that I'm sure it wasn't designed to. I still have an old Polaroid photo of that fish somewhere around here - me in my Toughskins jeans - you can't really see that our cat gnawed its face off while it was sitting in the bed of the truck while I told my glory story to everyone in the kitchen.

That's the one that started this whole adventure for me. Lucky for me, when I was a kid, both Mill Creek and Goldsborough Creek in Shelton had decent numbers of salmon and a few steelhead in them.