Winter Dungies & Steel

Minnowmagnet was already half a crab limit into his day when Peso & I rolled into the Bay just after sunrise. We followed the lower river on the way in and passed the caravan of drift boats sweeping the river for winter chrome unicorns. The night before I couldn’t sleep with lucid dreams of cold hard steelhead fights & bountiful limits of crab.
   Crabbing was a little tough and we kept pulling up the “sorority house” with only a few keepers in the pot. Minnowmagnet quickly cooked up the harvest & we grabbed a burger & beer before launching on a quiet river for the afternoon.
   The river was a beautiful steelhead green & it felt real fishy as we float fished from drift to drift. We only saw a couple fish hooked & lost all afternoon as we pounded water and eventually settled onto a nice long runout of walking pace water. This was a perfect location to safely setup a long side drift from the kayak. Matching the drift with my gear only feet away I watched my bobber drain & as I lifted the rod buckled with line peeling off the reel. What an adrenaline rush in the first few seconds as I tried to gauge the size of the fish and the kind of ride I was in for. Is there a Small Fish Brag Board? Thankfully this was my smallest Steelhead of the year, but one of the most memorable, and after a few runs and a short fight downstream I had this chromer in the kayak. What a hoot. Peso pounded it out repeating this same drift from the kayak and eventually he hooked a hot fish that ran the opposite direction upriver and broke him off; not bad for a newbie. 
Minnowmagnet is a kayak fishing machine and the name “magnet” says it all; this guy catches fish!  It wasn’t long before he hooked and releaseed a beautiful native steelhead from the bank. This was an epic winter day on the coast making memories with good friends. Even the wife was happy I was gone for the whole day, once she was eating Crab Fried Ramen & Crispy Steelhead for dinner.

Minnowmag's Native Release

Aw,geez....MurseStrong and Minnowmagnet teamed up...the fish dont stand a chance.Beautiful fish,great story.  And as always, the finished plate looked great. Congrats guys and thanks for the play by play...here's to hoping for more of that!

Hey wasn't somebody spoda change  his name to "Fn-Minnowmagnet"
Nice report and I concur that dude can fish.

I think Effin is his middle name, but he goes. Y Minnowmagner!

Nice report guys!

What a kick ass day!! Way to mix it up!

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Beautiful write up!  Just what I needed on a Monday.

-Mark-