First day of winter break for us teachers and I am always looking forward to a couple weeks off to spend with family, friends, and fishing. Showed up at the river right at dawn and we were planning on getting as much fishing in as we could before the monsoon that was forecast raised the river beyond safe and fishable levels. We were targeting steelhead but the run that we were fishing had an abundance of stacked up chum and coho in it and it took only about five casts before I had a nice size chum on (one of two for the day). I was not prepared/expecting to have a 12-13lb hard fighting salmon on my line and it took me close to ten minutes to get the first one to shore. I was spooled with 10lb test mainline and an 8lb test leader that handled the fish perfectly, thanks in large part to the length of my centerpin rod (13' 6") which absorbed the head shakes that likely would have broken the fish off had I been using my spinning rod when I hooked up. While we were hoping for steelhead, it was a good day of firsts for me personally and I learned a lot about the limits of my preferred gear and tackle. First chums landed on the centerpin with a jig that I tied and largest fish weight to line test ratio for me. I almost left my big rod at home in favor of a 7wt switch float rod that I thought would match up well with hatchery steelhead, but I think I'll save that for the summer runs when there isn't the potential of hooking into something more substantial like there is here in the Fall/early Winter.

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