Photos: BC West Staff
Well George ‘Dump Bear’ Cook, Michael ‘Whitey’ White, Jeff ‘The Mayor’ Watt, Greg ‘no longer stranded on a Montana highway’ Thomas, Andrew ‘The Don’ Bennett, and Gary ‘the cane pole builder’ Berenson all had the ride of their lives into camp via Captain Richard and the A-star heli, featuring up-close glacier viewing and an amazing view of the Dean River Canyon.
The crew looked like kids stumbling off their first carnival ride when they disembarked the chopper and met us at the strip. Given the hot fishing the week previous, the departing guests quickly had everybody jacked with stories of hot steelhead and still silver spring salmon (or Kings or Chinooks, depending on your neck of the woods).
The week the started where the previous left off, with first time Dean steelheader Greg Thomas musing he was finally here…(truck packed it in on the way to airport at home in Montana) only to be interrupted by the first of four steelhead in his first shift!
So much for thinking it might be tough…the rest of the gang all put fish on the board as well within the weekend, with some guys going better than 6 hook-ups a day. The upper river continued to see fish moving through and water conditions remained stellar…by week’s end Greg even skated a couple up on dries only to fail to hook up…but the rush of seeing them coming was still there.
The numbers this week were strong – really strong – with the ‘slumping’ rod putting up ‘only’ 2 fish a day. By mid-week some weather bumped the river up and everyone started hitting them out of the park again. Overall the guests were 77 steelhead landed for 121 hooked, and all walked away pretty baffled by the experience.
It really was an epic week of historical proportions.
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