Last Friday afternoon my wife Eileen and I drove up north to see what we could learn about the steelhead fishing. When we stopped at Wells Dam I looked over the edge and watched a boat land a steelhead down below me. There was another boat that appeared to be anchored off the rip rap bank near the fish ladder outlet, and I think there were a couple of guys fishing on the bank there, too. We drove on up to Pateros and actually set up on one of the docks there. We had the whole waterfront to ourselves, which wasn’t a good sign. There were chunks and sheets of ice floating all around off the docks, and I could see that the estuary above the bridges was frozen all the way across. While we were fishing Lindsay, the fish checker, came by to see how we were doing. We didn’t have much to report, but we learned from her that there are some fish being caught, and most of them are coming from the area above Wells Dam. She knew of four keepers that had been taken that Friday.