Saturday was a weird day. And this will be a long post.

I had talked to JonB, who I am fishing with more and more as we're willing to be crazy together ... more on that shortly .... and we met up at the Skykomish River along with one of JonB's buddies to try to find some silvers. Got there just about first light, and were gone in half an hour. JonB made the call, in that he felt if there were fish, they'd be rolling, and there was nothing. Not a single ripple in the water the entire time we were there.

So we quickly drove to the Wallace. I had always thought snagging was a random sort of thing. Well, under the bridge at the Wallace I got to observe snagging in action, and it turns out it is quite methodical!

So after another ... oh, 45 minutes or so I'd guess, we rolled out of there again. Two stops, maybe 1 bite? At this point it was time to ignore the ominous weather and hit Bosworth, where we surely would get bites!

And now back to us being crazy. We did catch 2 limits, because ... that's what we do! I'll get back to the fish, because this post will end with an angry rant. But we were in the water at let's say 11ish, and about noon it started raining. No big deal, right? WRONG. It rained on us straight through until 4pm when pulled the raft out. I didn't know what hypothermia was before Saturday. It turns out that the symptoms are, you start shivering uncontrollably, but you dont really feel cold. So I just kept shivering and kept fishing. For like 90 minutes, while being rained on, after already being rained on for 2 and a half hours.

It's hard to explain how cold I was. Let me give the best example. When I run the defrost, normally it's about 2 minutes before it's so sweltering, unbearably hot in the car I have to turn it off.

Yeah.

I had the car running with defrost full blast for15 minutes before I got in. Intellectually, I know it was like 110 degrees in the car. Maybe hotter. I drove from Bosworth to the gas station in Machias, about 15-20 minutes, still shivering. In a 110+ degree car. I bought a full pound of hot chicken strips, went back to the car, turned it and the defrost back on, and ate the chicken. That finally ended the shivering. Then I drove all the way back to Shoreline, another 30 minutes, WITH THE DEFROST ON FULL BLAST. 45 minutes in a car that was so hot that normally I can only stand 2 minutes.

It was *just* starting to feel hot by the time I got home.

And now for my rant. There are 2 pics. One was the biggest fish, just over 13 inches. The other was a fish that some IDIOT gut hooked and released.

I hope that you read this post, whatever idiot did this. I really do. Because you are a menace to wildlife. And really, if you are this dumb, you are a menace to everyone.

This idiot gut hooked a rainbow, in Bosworth where the limit is FIVE with no minimum size, and decided to release it! That is idiotic and disrespectful enough on its own. But then this nit wit, instead of cutting the line at the trout's mouth, cuts the line clear up past the snap swivel! The trout, swimming around dangling a black thing, says hey, let's eat this! So now the trout has hook, AND a snap swivel in its stomach. And a loop of line out its mouth. And what do loops do? They catch on things. So this loop of line catches behind the front fins. And now the stomach, doing what stomachs do, starts to pass the snap swivel. PULLING THE LOOP TIGHTER. Eventually the trout passes the swivel, now causing the line to cut into either side of its mouth, and cut into it's belly. Strangling it like a tree strangles if you tie a rope around it. Thankfully for this poor fish, we caught it. No thanks to the MORON that made such a stupid SERIES of choices.

Long story short, we caught no fish in the Skykomish, no fish in the Wallace but did see 2 snaggers in action (who posted a report fishing in the Skykomish? That's bright), we got hypothermia AND each got a limit at Bosworth, and we saved a fish that was slowly dying due to another angler's stupidity from suffering any further. It was a busy day.

5 stars for ... "great" might not be the right word, but I surely do have lots of memories from Saturday!

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