Scott Staats
Anybody can catch big fish.
Anglers do it every day. The tricky part is to hook big fish and never get them to the boat – I excel at this. The following are some of my more memorable accomplishments.
Probably my biggest misses occurred while fishing for salmon on the Umpqua River several years ago. By 7 a.m. we had begun back-trolling Kwikfish in one of the first riffles. While letting out the line, a fish struck and my knee-jerk reaction ended with setting the hook too fast and too hard. Miss No. 1.
At the bottom of another riffle, while fishing with eggs, the rod tip began to dance so I waited the suggested two to three seconds and then yanked. Miss No. 2.
After putting a new cluster of eggs on the hook, I let the line back out, hoping the salmon only got a taste of eggs and not hook. Within a minute or two came strike three, or as I prefer to say, hit No. 3. This fish fought hard for about ten minutes and when only a few feet from the boat, it jumped.
“Don’t worry,” the guide assured me, “these fish rarely spit the hook when they jump.” The fish spit the hook. Miss No. 3.
“Strike Four” went very much like No. 3, except that fish finally made it to the net. The chinook weighed 23 pounds and measured 35 inches. I guess there’s no such thing as strike four but if there was I’m sure to patent it.
When it comes to losing big fish, I possess the unique ability of even making people with me lose fish. For example, back on the Umpqua River my wife and I joined the aforementioned guide another time for some steelhead fishing. Toward the end of the day, our guide drifted the boat to a likely section of river that he said should hold a nice fish or two. As I would soon find out, he was right.
I found myself in the midst of lobbing out some tasty bait (we were side-drifting so my wife and I fished on the same side of the boat) when the guide said to my wife, “NOW, you got one!” From what I recall, two things happened simultaneously. She set the hook and I tried to stop my cast in mid-swing. What happened next can only be described as frantic chaos.
My line wrapped around the end of her rod like a calf roper’s lasso around a set of young bovinian legs. The last revolution of my line encircled her rod with the slapping sound of a spaghetti strand entering a mouth, rendering her rod as immobile as a lunatic in a straightjacket.
We all realized that she indeed had on the lunker of the day. I tried hectically to untangle the mess to no avail. The steelhead took advantage of my clever, er clumsy, maneuver and broke the line. Now, I swear (and by the way, so did the guide) I was only trying to help. I didn’t want to cast over her line.
She had already caught a bigger steelhead than me and landing this fish would have also put her into the “caught more fish” category as well. So this rather unfortunate accident kept us in a tie for at least one category. My wife, being the good sport she is, said this didn’t faze her. On the drive back home, I said it was sort of funny what happened, but she said “funny” wasn’t exactly the word she would choose.
Some of the biggest fish I’ve never caught are bull trout. The first time I ever fished for them, I hooked into a monster on only my third cast to shore. The fish struck hard and you would think that, with a crankbait displaying two or three large treble hooks, it would be impossible for a fish to get off. Not so.
I worked the fish to within netting distance of the boat when it simply disappeared, as if being beamed back to the dark depths of the reservoir. I would have felt better if it broke the line but it just spit out the wide array of hooks and vanished. If just one of those hooks got into my clothes or skin, I’d still be trying to dig it out today.
The John Day River is another site for many of my big misses, which include smallmouth bass and steelhead.
During the first day of a cold two-day winter steelhead float trip on the lower river I hooked a nice fish. There’s no mistaking the strike of a steelhead.
I don’t always listen to every bit of advice from every guide or outfitter (and have lost some nice fish because of it), but this time I did. Ten minutes earlier, our small group pulled the two drift boats ashore on an island and the guide told me and the other two anglers to do some fishing while he and his other guide prepared lunch. He also told us to yell if we hooked a fish so he could come running with the net.
After making sure the fish was securely attached to my line and watching it jump a few times, I yelled out something like, “Fish on, bring the net!” I was at least 100 yards downriver, around a bend with a rather strong breeze blowing downriver as well. After a minute or two, I noticed no one coming to my rescue so I yelled again and added a few high-pitched whistles. Still nothing.
Oh well, better concentrate on the fish for a while, I thought. It made a run upriver, then across the river, screaming line from the reel. Then it decided to make a run right at me so I reeled for all I was worth trying to keep tension on the line. Both of us seemed to be tiring as the fish got to within 10 feet of shore in less than a foot of water.
Perhaps a lull in the wind or a louder whistle finally got the others’ attention and they came a-running – or at least fast a-walking, being in chest waders and negotiating a minefield full of cobbles that lay between us. When the guide stood beside me with the net, I could finally relax. The fish however, had one more burst of energy left and after a quick “thrash and splash” he dashed back to the middle of the river, minus my lure.
Not exactly how I pictured “catch and release,” but it was fun while it lasted. Oh, did I mention that I also managed to lose a second steelhead while casting from the boat the next day?
Scott Staats is a full-time outdoor writer who lives in Prineville.