This morning I caught my first steelhead on a fly, purple egg sucking leech It was 25 inches with a girth 11 inches I estimated him to weigh about 7/7.5lb there is no greater feeling than catching fish on a fly rod. Caught him on the umatilla in eastern oregon, Probably not one of the greatest places to catch you first fly caught steelhead.

congrats, sounds like a great place to catch your first fly caught steelie. ive caught lots on drift gear, but dont have the skills to do the fly thing. maybe i can find someone to teach me.

Right on! i havent even master drift fishin yet so i dont think im quite ready for the fly thing.
Tyler

Hey trophydeer, that is super. I used to live in Pendleton, still have a grandmother that lives there. In all the time I lived there, I never fished the Umatilla. I have a few 'buds' that I met on here that live in Pendleton and fish the Umatilla, e mail me for their names and maybe you could hook up with em. I decided to take up fly fishing last summer and just went with a 8.5 foot, 5-6# trout rod and reel combo to see if I liked it and I was hooked from there. It is so fun! I caught like 15 trout in an hour on the Green river, what a blast. Now I tie my own flies and that can be fun and rewarding as well. I am anxious to get back to the states and try my luck at a fly caught steelie, great job man! Say, send me an e mail if you want and we can BS about stuff. Justin

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

That's cool about your son. No matter how he caught the fish he will always remember that one.

Way to go trophydeer ! The first one is great and it only keeps getting better.