How spectacular is a 22 pound stealhead?
Real impressive. I've never caught one myself over 20.
I think I told you I used to guide down on the lower Rogue. One day my customers got a 17 pounder that was fresh from the ocean and a 20+ pounder that was spawned out and skinny.
I'd guess the big one would have been 27 pounds or a little more fresh. A *monster*, once in a lifetime fish for a dedicated fisherman. they wanted to keep it, i wanted to throw it back. It was black and ugly, not fit to eat. We knocked it in the head. It lay there in the fish box changing colors from black to red to green. Nasty.
Some rivers have a higher percentage of 20+ pound fish than others. The Rogue is not one of them. The design of the fish hatchery is such that the big fish don't go through the tube to the spawning table so they go in the cat foot pile, it's only the "little" fish that return their genes to the gene pool at that hatchery. This is more apparent with chinook than steelhead, not very many steelhead wont' go down the tube, but the ones that wont are the ones us fishermen would most like to have their genes stay in the gene pool. It's difficult to remove an ODFW biologist's head from their rear end.
Er ... sorry, guess I went off.
Anyways, yes, a 22 pound steelhead is something to write home about. That's a better fish than most dedicated steelhead fishermen will see in their lifetime.
Tom
