The next day, I was going to give the main river a good go at it. My plan was to hike up from the campground a couple of miles (to get away from the few other people who were fishing the stream), and then fish upstream for a couple more miles before hiking back.



Well, when I go to the spot where I wanted to try fishing, it was still a little early for the fish to be looking up, so I tied on a big black wooly bugger and figured I'd swing it through the pool. This guy slammed it on the very first cast:



Two casts later another fish slammed it. Three casts after that, I picked up my third fish from the same pool. My original plan was to throw dries, but fish were slamming streamers. I really like it when fish slam streamers. I like it enough that I decided I'd just swing streamers and fish my way downstream back to camp. That was a good decision.

This guy figured that if I was going to stick a hook in him, he'd do the same to me and see how I like it. I throw streamers with stinger hooks a lot when I'm swinging, and so far I'd managed to avoid getting one hook in the fish and another in me at the same time. But it was bound to happen eventually....





That's just one more reason why I pinch my barbs down. Both the fish and my finger came off the hook quite easily, before too much damage was done.

After I made it about a mile or so downstream, I finally saw a couple of people coming upstream. They were still a couple hundred yards away, so I figured I'd swing through one more hole and then walk around them and get back in downstream. This hole consisted of an overhanging bush, which was about 25 feet upstream from a large tree stretching nearly all the way across the river. Well, my very first cast through that hole I hooked up with a pretty stout cutthroat. I certainly wasn't going to be able to pull him upstream, so I was able to finagle my line around the first overhanging bush. But there was no way I was going to get around the big tree from the bank, and he was taking me downstream quickly. So it was either try to pull him back up against the current, and probably break him off, or cross the stream. The bank here was about 4' straight up, with no way to get down to the water. So, I did what every logical fisherman would do, and jumped in! Somehow, I stuck the landing, and was able to get across the stream and land him. I felt a little bad about jumping into that pool with a couple of fisherman heading upstream, but oh well. There were about 300 other pools I didn't jump into, so I didn't feel too bad about it.

He measured right at 17" against the rod. Not huge by any means, but a pretty nice fish, especially in fast current.




Once I got past those guys, the river started moving quite a bit faster.