The last day of the slot in the lower river would prove to be THE glory day of the early season.... talk about going out with a bang. The river saw a MAJOR push of big hens in the 45-50# class.
We started our morning with Don, a friend of my brother joining our party. At last, backtrolling with four rods! Up the odds, right? Well, maybe not.
Unbeknownst to me, one of the rods got let out way too far. I had rigged bobber stops on the superbraid to mark how much line to put out. Unfortunately, with all the fish Katosan and I had been catching, the stops had moved every which way during the previous battles. Take home lesson..... the bobberstop method of marking the put-out distance sucks.... the damn things move. Much better to just count levelwind passes like we had always done before I tried to "improve" it.
Anyway, one of the rods fishing a short line suddenly decided to slam down with line peeling. Before my brother Noel could get to the rod, the tip pops back up and we all decide the fish "came off". Holy crap.... missed strike!
Noel reels in to check the bait, and half way in, he encounters resistance and a head shake.... Holy crap! Fish on!
He goes to pass the rod off to his buddy Don and the line goes completely slack. Holy crap! Fish off!
As Don starts to reel in the slack, the line suddenly comes tight again and starts peeling like mad straight downriver. Holy crap... fish is STILL on!
We couldn't get the "long-line" rod reeled in quick enough.... hell it was only out there about 20 passes!@$%^&*. Before you knew it, we had the classic cluster**** with whirling lures and limp superline creating a tangle we could not reel thru.
Holy crap @##$%%^^&&..... time for a hack job. Holy double crap @#$^^&&**.... which line do I cut? Both rods have identical moss green Spiderwire Stealth viewed against a green river in the low light of dawn.
I say a little prayer before parting one of the lines with my fillet knife........ WHEW!...... fish still on after at least a 30 second totally slack line!
When she surfaced for the first time we knew we had a hold of a good one (Tequila Sunrise strikes again, except this version with the Thin Twin and extra Corkie is now known as the UniBomber 2 in honor of its inventor, Katosan):
Despite all the screw-ups, we land this platinum 45 x 28 hen, est 48#. The best-composed money shot turned out blurred due to early am condensation on the camera lens, but the flash version at least shows the fish well.
Noel and Don had a halibut trip planned later that morning so I dropped them off and picked up two retirees (another Don and Dick) camped near us so as to keep a full complement of 4 rods fishing in the boat. Five minutes into the first pass.... BOOM... rod down. UB-2 strikes again and Don Sr is fast to another chrome hen. When we land it, it measured 43-7/8" x 25... a legal bonker, but at 37.5# it was about as big as you could bonk without breaking the slot law.
We work our way downriver over the next several hours. As we are working the run at Upper Beaver/ Chicago, a bite starts to materialize. Within a half hour, news is travelling fast across the on-river cell network, and 46 boats have converged on a 150-200 yd stretch of river. Over the next two hours, the bite is HOT. There's a rod down or a net up within view every five minutes. By the time it's all over we had seen 40+ fish on.... 3 of which were ours..... YEE HAW!. Not bad when you consider there were over 60 boats vying for those bites before it was all over. Dick got the biggest of the bunch.... check out this 48 x 27.5 freshly minted mama, est 49#:
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