Steelhead: 9 Degrees and Cooling

“Thirty yards of fly line and a couple hundred yards of backing was pulled from his reel in mere seconds. I grabbed the net and ran down along the shore as quickly as possible, but it was too late. The fish broke loose behind a large rock several hundred yards downriver. That steelhead was about 30 inches long and would have weighed nearly 12 pounds. It’s fish like that, and the few minutes of action, that draws us into the cold later until our feet are numb.” Rick Brockway writes about cold-fishing for steelhead in the Salmon River near Pulaski, New York. On TheDailyStar.com.