Flood, Fire and Chrome

We’d driven through the night only to find 31 trailers already in queue at the boat launch red taillights bent by the rain sliding down our windshield Welcome to a Thursday morning on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula in the peak of winter steelhead season.

We stepped onto the muddy road and flipped up the hoods of our wading jackets. One of us said what we were all thinking: “Our flies don’t stand a chance behind all these boats.”

I was there with three guys I barely knew, but after this trip we would fish together almost exclusively. They didn’t yet have their nicknames, but they would earn them soon enough. It was “Bomber” — 6-foot-3, red hair, a rod builder and Spey guide always with a half-can of Grizzly Long Cut in his lip — who turned to me and said, “I know a place. Think the four of the us can carry your boat?”

Bomber led us bouncing down an overgrown logging road that terminated where an old clearcut met ancient forest. We could hear the river but not yet see it. Before us towered trees wider than my drift boat, quilts of green moss and yellow lichen climbing the trunks. At their feet grew neck-high ferns and thickets of vine maple. We were several miles below the crowded ramp now, and just above some of the best fly water on the Hoh River. All we had to do was drag my 500-pound boat through this forest and lower it into an eddy of churning water.

The Psychology of Chrome

Deep inside most Spey-casting steelheaders is a masochist or a recovering Catholic. The first finds twisted pleasure in the sleepless nights, blistered heels and shocking credit-card statements that precede fly-caught steelhead. The second believes that he was born guilty and that only faithful struggle can earn him moments of transcendence.

Bomber is the recovering Catholic. “Viking” — duly named because of his ratty blond beard and thick legs, which seem made for running up rocky shores with spear in hand — is the masochist.

I like to think I’m a