Last weekend my fishing partner, Gary and I, went fishing and decided to leave the drift boat at home and bank it. We thought a little exploration would do us good for some later date.

We did do quite well, hooking 7, landing 2, almost landing, 2 and well the others got the best of us.

The funny part of the story starts here, I had just missed a fish, when my partner casts and solidly hooked one. He plays it and I get in the water on a precarious clay bank and tail his fish. Of course, we were expecting to be normally catching only natives in this river in March so I was about to unhook it and let it go, when I noticed that the fish had no adipose! My partner yells out, "We Eat Tonight" and we put her on the bank. My buddy pulls this homemade device out of his vest and puts it through the gills of the fish. It had a nice wood handle on it for carrying the fish through the woods.

We left this hole after losing another fish and proceeded downriver to a long stretch of "nice water" on a long bar. Gary leaves the steelie in about an inch of water and heads downstream, while I decide to cross the river and fish the other side of the hole upriver. I can barely see my buddie doing some peculiar antics downstream. After about a half hour, I see him coming back up to meet me, and I meet him half-way. He tells me that he just lost two fish at the same time, and I said "What"?

He had hooked a large nate (High Teens) and chased it and finally got it to his knees near a big boulder and the line hit the rock and snapped. He had the fish in his grasp, so I told him, oh well, we are C/R anyway. Then he told me how he lost the other fish, after losing that fish he came back to tell me to join him downstream and to retrieve his Hatchery Steelie. He was about 25 feet from where he had put his steelhead and saw the darndest thing. Some silly otter was dragging his fish into the depths and to make it even funnier was that he had the "wood handle" of Gary's fish carrier in his mouth.
First words out of my mouth were....."OTTER EATS TONIGHT"!

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Steve Ng....The FishNg1
99 F-350 Powerstroke 4x4 , 18ft Alumaweld Formula Vee Sled, 115 Yamaha.