Opening day of the lowland trout put-n-take turd fish season.

Imagine the dude who is out in his garage last night, tying up leaders, sharpening the hooks on his spoons, or re-tying the knots on his plug rods, gazing happily at his fully equipped $7,000.00 drift boat...and dreaming of ending up the season with a couple of big silver bullets while sipping on a nice beer...

...and then Wife, along with reality comes crashing in.

Wife: You're not going steelhead fishing again!

Husband: WTF are you talking about, woman?!

Wife: You've been steelhead fishing for three months...[blah, blah, blah, blah]...and you are taking our two kids that I have had to stay home with every weekend for the past three months while you've been out floating around catching steelhead and not even bringing home any to eat!!

Husband: [burble, burble] (Can't speak, is choking on a smooth microbrew that has all of a sudden became very, very bitter)

*Cut to Saturday morning*

$7,000.00 driftboat is now floating four feet from the boat launch on Pine Lake...there are 27 other boats within easy casting distance, and at least 300 boats on the lake.

Kid tosses out spinner approximately 27 inches from boat...Husband pulls once on the oar, and it is fish on...a wily 5.7 incher that was hosed out of a WDFW truck about four hours earlier hoists its tiny body 2 inches out of the water, and then is in the boat.

Husband: Nice one. (and takes a deep pull off the 36 oz. coffee cup that is full of bourbon)

Thirty eight minutes later the boat has "limited" on 4 to 7 inch "rainbows"...and four hours later there is room at the launch to get his $7,000.00 drift boat back on the trailer.

During the three and half hour wait at the launch to get the boat out of the water, Husband daydreams about the childless members of the steelhead fraternity...those who are floating down a river somewhere using lures bigger than the flopping pond rats that are strung on the stringer and floating belly up beside his boat...he envisions them catching half a dozen beautiful and big sea run rainbows, fish that have never seen the inside of a cement pond, much less been trucked around and hosed into a muddy cesspool of a lake.

The coffee cup is now empty of bourbon, but thankfully he found four old beers stowed under the seat from last week's steelhead trip...a trip that seems years ago, and thousands of miles away.

Happy Opening Day!! I'm outta here in an hour and a half for the river...see ya on Tuesday!



Fish on...

Todd