Steelhead Time
The innocuous morning clouds provide a fuzzy canvas for the color orange. Not a deep orange, more like a sweet creamsicle orange.The water is flat, the air cold but still. Unfortunately I’m heading to work, not out to catch my first steelhead of the year.I had a great alibi when I lived in California – I lived in California. There were plenty of chances to get stocked trout, or drive a little farther and get native browns and rainbows. (Native in the sense that at some point the browns too had been stocked or the rainbows reintroduced, but they were certainly not the dull-colored, lazy fish with fins rounded by the time they’d spent wearing them down on the concrete raceways in which they were raised.)We never got into steelhead. I had a group of buddies that went steelhead fishing on the Russian River near Guerneville, but the general stores and shops seemed to be holding on to an age that had long since passed...See column at:http://www.capitalcityweekly.com/stories/021517/out_1272845819.shtml