Sharphooks
Well-Known Member
I’ve always considered myself first and foremost a steelheader. I’ve been chasing steel since the mid 70’s and during all those years, I’ve only missed one or two trips up to Skeena Country and get as much time in on my home waters as water conditions and regs allow....there are way more months in the year open to fishing steelhead then there are to fishing salmon so there’s that.
Meanwhile, when I fished the THompson River in the 80’s and 90’s, I used to hear stories about the Dean River—-how those were the only other steelhead in the world that could hold a candle to Thompson fish as far as taking your reel down to the bare spool on just the first run.
But as soon as I heard that the only way to get a piece of the Dean steelhead was to stay in a lodge, I mentally crossed that river off my list. I’m just not a lodge kind of guy. I fish to be alone and getting jetted up and down a river in somebody else’s boat ain’t being alone
So this past July I had a friend ask if I wanted to partner with him in a DYI trip to the Dean: we’d charter a helicopter from Hagensborg and they’d drop us off on the river and we’d camp and fish for a straight week. I was all in on that approach and signed on.
In retrospect, just getting to the airfield to meet the chopper was a huge ordeal....fires everywhere which meant lots of extra driving due to all the detours. Then there was highway 20 out of Williams Lake down to Bella Coola. That was an adventure in itself—-pea-soup fog, driving through thick clouds while dodging logging trucks on hair-pin corners while negotiating a 15 degree grade. Yikes—- aside from being an engineering masterpiece, it’s a genuine contender for pucker factor....and guys drag their boats up and down that hill—-crazy.
The guy I went with didn’t mess around when it came to bringing gear:
Here was our camp site for 8 days.
My partner had 7 or 8 trips to the Dean already under his belt so he knew what those fish wanted and out-hooked me in the fish department. When I finally figured out these fish liked dry flies, I caught a few. Amazing to see them boil the skin of the river and suck your fly down!
I brought out the sinking line to get a bit deeper and hooked a few fish, one of them which took me to the spool of my reel before I had a chance to even get out of the river. It went over the lip of a set of rapids and that was it . I mentioned to my partner that I hadn’t had a fish like that in over 15 years. I have a nice battle scar: a crease in my knuckle where the running line cut me almost to the bone on that run
It reminded me of a Thompson fish I hooked below the Black Canyon downstream of Ashcroft back in the good old days. The fish took my fly at a sprint then proceeded to peel off 200 yards of fly line and backing on one long uninterrupted run that was a stone-cold wonder to behold. I remember thinking the only way I could have gotten near that fish would have been to have had a Kawasaki 500 powered up on the beach waiting for me with dirt tires
The sinking line also bought me a nice chinook: It was heartening to see all the chinook in the hole we were fishing....I couldn’t help wondering if maybe I hooked this same fish this summer in Dean Channel
The down-side of the trip: a fire just upstream. When the wind came up it was like smoking a pack of Marlboros every day
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