After spending a fruitless and freezing morning Turkey hunting, my brother Dan and I decided to head to the Salmon River and try our luck fly fishing for steelhead. What an outing this turned out to be! When we got there bugs were hatching and flying around everywhere. Trout were rising right and left and I couldn’t resist the temptation of tying on a dry fly and catching a few. Well, after catching a couple of dozen little trout we decided to move downstream to a couple of pools. My brother immediately snagged a rock and asked me for another fly. I ended up giving him a prince nymph and I headed down the stream a bit further to continue to mess around with the rainbows and baby salmon. I had just caught a 12 in rainbow and was going to look up and yell at my brother to look when I saw his pole double over! He looked down at me and I tried to run up to his position but the slime level on the rocks were unreal and I more or less skated along to him. He fought the fish like a man on a mission and I tried in vain to net it as jumped all over the place and then wrapped itself around my legs! I carefully freed myself and finally netted his fish. We took a few pics and then released the fish to the water. Jealous, I decided to start fishing for steelhead. My brother snagged again and he came over for another fly. I gave him a green beadheaded wooly bugger and I fished out a black stonefly nymph for myself. My brother was on another steelhead almost immediately. Shaking my head in disbelief I again assisted in him in bringing in the fish and we snapped some more pictures. I saw a big fish rise so I went over to where I saw the ripples and sent my nymph into the current. I immediately had a take and after three jumps I was broken off. I forgot that when I was messing around with the smaller trout I had tied on a lighter tippet and it didn’t stand a chance against the desperate fish. I tied on a stronger tippet and this time I tied on a black wooly bugger and headed up to a run that ran along a rock wall. As I got up there my brother had a quick take but it turned out to be a smallmouth. I flipped my wooly bugger into the current and was turning to talk to my brother when my pole almost shot out of my hands as a massive steelhead nailed my line. She hit the wooly bugger so fast that my reel couldn’t keep up with it and a huge birds nest instantly stopped my line. My brother was watching the fish and was wondering what was going on when he looked over at me. “Follow the fish!” he yelled as I frantically scrambled over slippery rocks trying to keep her from breaking off. I only had about 20 yards of float line out and I was getting nervous. My brother raced over and tried to get the mess out of my reel but the tension was too tight from the fish. I then had to keep my 6wt Orvis fly rod high in the air as I kept tension on the float line with my left hand by pulling down, giving my brother enough slack to work with on my reel. Keep in mind we still haven’t even seen the fish yet and we are racing through the water trying to keep her from breaking off while my brother raced along beside me unworking the tangled mess. Then the fish decided to jump and we got our first glimpse of our tormentor. We both grasped as she lept completely clear of the water a couple more times. By this time my arms are getting extremely tired from fighting the fish with both arms raised into the air pulling on the float line with the one hand and raising the rod high to give my brother room to work. I heard the reel sing as he pulled out the last of the mess and then frantically reeled in the excess line. “There you go!” He then grabbed the net and readied himself. I fought the fish for a few more minutes before she tired enough to be tricked in. We couldn’t believe what our twenty minute ordeal had yielded. We took some pictures and released the magnificent fish back into the water. High fives all around and then we were back in business. Three casts later and I was into another fish. This fight wasn’t nearly as involved as the last and after the short battle my brother quickly netted the fish and again after a few snapshots, we released the fish. Not wanting to press our luck after our flurry of success we decided to call it a day. And wouldn’t you know it on the way out we had to cross some train tracks and my brother happened to see a nice steelhead. When I bent over to look my cell phone fell out of my vest and thirty feet down to the water below. Good thing that I bought the extended warranty! What a memorable day. I’ll never forget racing along the stream slipping and sliding all over the place as my brother tried to fix my fly reel. Thanks bro.