I wonder how many of us feel this way about other forms of fishing, that other methods are so hard or require so much skill.

Please, please don't take this as a fly fishing is better than others ways of fishing comment.To me it seems much harder to fish for steelhead with gear or bait than to fly fish for them.

As an aside, my 6 yr old son joins trophydeer more or less, he hooked his first steelhead on a fly this weekend. He hooked it in a big tailout when we were just goofing around skating a muddler across the top of the water column.

He had just bought the fly because he like the way it looked and wanted to try it. I kept telling him it wouldn't work, why didn't he just swing a wet fly on a sink tip. But he insisted on doing it his way. You should of seen the splash when it snarfed his fly.

You also should have seen the 'I told you so' look he gave me right after the fish hit. I thought for a moment he was going to lose his (my) stick over the edge when it hit.

He played it in and lost it right in front of the raft. I was on the sticks and couldn't give him a lot of help as we had floated past the tailout into some faster water.

I told him he could count it as caught because we would have released it anyway.

Sure was fun watching him.

Wes