Floating 13+ Miles for Winter Steelhead! Solo Camping at Isolated Canoe Campsite

You look so happy. All right, yo, what's going on guys? Chief's here and today I got a pretty cool video planned for you guys. I'm going to be on the drift boat, but I'm by myself today. And we are going to be going into a canoe in campsite that you can only get to by rowing into like taking a raft or canoe, kayak, whatever. It seems like you guys really liked that last camping video. I appreciate all the love and support on that. Currently rowing down the river. We got a couple of miles until I make it to the campsite that we're going to be staying at tonight, but this is about the first time I've really gotten to get out so far this year. It's like pretty much two weeks into January. Now we've been in a pretty hard cold snap. I just haven't really had the opportunity to get out like I'd like to. I was looking at the forecast, came across a couple of days above 32 degrees and the night temperatures weren't miserable in the single digits, anything over like 20 degrees at night. I like to camp in, in the winter, anything below that, I'm kind of pushing it. It's getting a little extreme. I will say I was pretty comfortable in that last video, but there was definitely a couple of times where I woke up and I was just like, dang, we're doing this. So I kind of took a late start to today. Wanted to wait until the water temperatures got a little bit higher. I usually do better in middle of the day in the winter anyway. So if we could just get like one or two fish today, I'd be pretty happy. It seems like we've been getting into some pretty quality fish, which has been nice. Hopefully I can make a pretty cool camping video for you guys again and get into some steelhead. So we're going to switch over to some steelhead fishing now and hopefully we can stack one. Let's get it. If I can just get this freaking net, excuse me. It's a nice fish though. I mean, yes, got it. Let's go. I'm going to make this quick. Nice little mommy colored up. Quick shot. Nice freaking head. Probably four pounds. That fish rolled around in the net a good amount. So I'm going to retie my leader since it looks like we're going to have limited opportunities today, but it's come to my attention that some, uh, some keyboard warriors on the internet been talking about your boy and they don't like that. I get excited when I catch my fish. So I'm not here to say that I'm like the greatest steelhead fisherman ever or anything like that. I'm not trying to be that. I'm just bringing you guys on some cool adventures. And, uh, I just like sharing what I do in general. Like I, I play video games every day. I share that with you guys. Everything I do is pretty much online and that's pretty, that's literally how I support myself for the last like four years. Don't get it twisted. You guys don't even see half the fish I catch, but whenever I like to do these cool little trips and stuff, I like to make something out of it and share my experience with you guys. So by any means, I'm not the greatest steelhead fisherman ever, but I will say I do know a thing or two and I can confidently say that I have consistent and I catch a lot of fish. So take my advice for, as you will, I don't really care. You don't have to listen to me, but, uh, we catch fish and have fun a lot. So, um, screw me, I guess. Right. I don't know. Um, I just wanted to get that off my chest, but I knew it feels pretty heavy. Oh yeah. It's a nice one. It's a, it's a chroma. It might be snagged on a log. It's snagged on a log. Are you kidding me? What are the chances? This fish is snagged on a log. It's snagged on a stick or something down there. Come on. It's snagged right on the stick. Oh, we got it. We got it. We got it. We got it. Now believe my name. That's just nuts to me. We got another one. Hey, you ain't giant, but we love it. We love a good, we love a good chromer. Come here. Good at chroma. Mommy. Fought her way longer than that. Oh, look at that. Nice. Nice quality fish. Let's go. Chromed out. We are arriving to the campsite right now. We got about an hour of daylight to spare before things shut down really quick. We still have to set up our tent. We got to get everything together. We got to gather some firewood, got to get a fire going. All right, so this is my recent purchase here. I finally got a jet boiler. I've heard pretty decent things about mountain house. They make these like freeze dried meals that all you have to do is add a boiling water to it. It says one open package tear notch, remove and discard the oxygen absorber. Carefully add one and three cups, 11 ounces of boiling water. Stir carefully, close zipper, wait five minutes. All right, it's boiled in about two and a half minutes. Supposedly these are really good. Okay. Stir carefully and close zipper. All right, now we wait. That's not bad. And I am pretty much a human garbage disposal and I will eat anything. And this is like definitely a solid seven, maybe up to an eight. And again, this is my first time ever making it. Maybe I made it wrong even, but I think I put a little extra too much water in there, but you can definitely tell like the chickens freeze dried in a couple of the bites sometimes, but I'm gonna eat this whole thing. A hundred percent. Not bad at all. All right guys, we just woke up. I think it's like seven o'clock right now. I got about an hour 15 till daylight. We got to pack up camp and make breakfast, coffee, get the boat packed and get fishing. So I slept pretty decent last night. It wasn't too bad. I woke up, I fell asleep super early at like eight 30 and I woke up at 4am kind of cold, but just wide awake because I had already slept for over six hours at that point. So I kind of just embraced it, stayed up for like 30 minutes, turned on the buddy heater, warmed up for a second and then fell back to sleep and just woke up. So it was pretty warm last night. It wasn't too bad. Um, it would have been nice maybe to have another layer because once I tried falling asleep from after four o'clock, that's when I got a little bit harder. Maybe it was just cause I was more awake, but overall not terrible night's sleep. I'm definitely rested and uh, it was, I'd say it was a successful camp. So yeah, let's freaking go. Just made some coffee and my breakfast skillet. Dang, that looks really dark at that. And then we just made this pro pack breakfast skillet. It's actually pretty good. Pretty impressed with these freeze dried meals. I mean, it's not like gourmet. Holy crap. I want to eat it all the time, but what gets the job done and uh, I'll eat anything. So I'm about halfway packed up now. So I'm going to finish that off. I'm kind of taking my time a little bit right now. I'm just waiting for it to warm up a little bit. Let this fire die down and uh, we're going to hit the river fishing. So probably get out of here in about 30, 45 minutes. The way it's looking right now. It's a subtle bite. I can't see it at all. I don't know how big it is. Oh man, it just scared a bunch of other fish. I just seen some other fish darting around a little colored up. I'm going to try and get a quick release on this one. One last look. There we go. Nice fish. Got a Largo. Let's go man. 10 o'clock. Bites turning on. I just got bit. I just got bit. That's awesome. That's so sick. Same spot. Same exact spot. Is this a brown? This is a big brown. For where I'm at. This is very special. This has got to be almost a 20 inch brown trout right there. That is incredible. Holy freaking crap, dude. Look at how beautiful that brown is. That's got to be almost 20 inches. That is so gorgeous. Oh my gosh. This is by far the coolest fish of the trip. Look at this guys. Hello. Hey, what's going on dude? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. How's it going? It looks so happy. No, no. Don't come down here. That's so nice. But you guys always ask for every video. What are you running? What's your rig? What kind of rig you got there, buddy? I'm here to tell you. So right here I'm just running a 12 gram float. Got three pieces of surgical tubing, one on top, one at the bottom of the stem, or one at the top of the stem, one at the bottom of the stem, two size seven water gremlin split shot. Three feet later, we've got three more size seven water gremlin split shots with a 80 pound barrel swivel. It's just an 80 pound barrel swivel right there. VMC makes it. Then I'm going to show you guys how I tie up my knots. Um, for our leader today, the leader of choice is FC sniper as the leader. I always stand behind this run in about 18 inches. Give it a little snip snap right there. And then I like to run a size six Raven wide gate poke. We got lower clear water. You know, some people think that this is a giant hook, but I catch fish all winter on it. Eight tens and twelves works great for a lot of people. Not saying it doesn't work and it can't help, but I'm not having an issue running sixes. Maybe it'll be something that changes down the road. But for the snell knot guys, I'm going to show you guys how to run a snell knot right here. Okay? So what I'm doing is I'm taking the front eye of the hook right here and I am running the line right through it. What we're going to do is we're going to be left with this right here, right? I'm going to pinch it off with our left hand. So what we're doing is we're kind of creating a loop right here. I don't know if it's showing up for you guys or not. And what we're going to do is we're going to take our leader and we're going to wrap it counterclockwise six to eight times. So we've got one, two, three, four, seven. I pinch it off right there. You guys can see right there. I hope it shows up. Maybe it'll, maybe it'll show up a little better. What you want here with this snell knot is you want all those wraps to be really tight. So make sure that you emphasize on keeping that tight. We're going to pinch it off with our left hand, keep our left hand pinched. We're just going to slide the pinch up to the, to the top of the hook. What we're going to do next is we're going to take our tag end, the other end of our leader, and we are going to run it through the opposite side of the hook. So we're going to run it through the back and keep it pinched and we're going to pull it tight. Boom. There you are left with a nice snell knot. Should sit like that. And I like that for, as a good leverage on the hook. As far as my swivel knot, I don't know if you guys have been paying attention, but when I break off, I am only losing my hook. That is because I am choosing to run a weaker knot at my hook. So when I do get snagged, I only lose my hook and I don't even lose my leader. And so what we're doing here is we're going to put a loop through the swivel, pull it tight. We're going to leave it about about dime size. If you guys want to start off, it's easy. If you keep the loop bigger, I don't need it this big to tie it myself. But what we're going to do is we're going to essentially imitate a double loop. And what we're going to do here is I'm going to take our tag on right here that I'm holding. We're going to wrap it around two, three, four, five, six. I'm going to take our tag on and then run it through both loops right there. I'm going to keep light tension. We're going to cinch the knot very lightly until we get to about here. This is a very important step right here. I'm leaving it just like this. I hope it's focusing. Probably not going to focus. It's all good though. So we have our knot right here. A little bit of saliva. We want to make sure our tag end is through a decent amount. All we're going to do is pull. You should see it cinch. Boom. Nice and tight. It's very important that you use saliva. Fluorocarbon has high abrasion resistance. So when that line's rubbing on itself, kind of looked weird. It can create heat and that friction will actually burn your line and put a weak spot in your line. So it's very important.