"I've read 'Don Quixote,' that ingenious gentleman of La Mancha, three times since I've been here, and not because I haven't had other things to read, but just because it's a fabulous book."

He knows of just one fish poached while he has lived on the pool. He found a splash of blood on the trail and a spool of line.

"I felt pretty used and abused, but then realized that one fish in nine years is better than regularly dynamiting and snagging out of the pool, which is what was true before FishWatch started," Spencer said.

Based on watching the fish in Big Bend Pool, he has concluded that the conventional wisdom of steelhead angling is wrong. The fish don't hold on the bottom, but a few feet from the surface, closer when the water is cooler. Dawn is not the best time for fishing, because the fish act like they are asleep. He has documented 1,466 items that steelhead have risen to in the pool. They include leaves, mayflies, plant down and even a bat.

"Were I trying to tie a fly pattern that represented what was most commonly risen to, it would be a pattern that represented a red dogwood leaf, a stick with stringy lichen attached, or a rolling piece of plant down," Spencer wrote in his latest notes.

After the bat swooped down and landed on the river, two steelhead swam out from the pod to investigate.

"One of them turned away and the larger of the two accelerated and took it explosively," Spencer said. "There was water everywhere. Then I watched the steelhead go downstream and 10 seconds later that bat bobbed back to the surface in the middle of the rise rings. It swam to the bank, climbed out about 4 feet, and dried off licking its belly for about an hour and flew away."

Like Lemire, Spencer became a devotee of the skated dry fly. Unlike dry fly-fishing for trout, where the point is to make the fly look like a natural insect the trout will want to eat, the skated dry fly is dragged across the surface, creating a wake intended to pique the curiosity of the steelhead.

Spencer fishes a simple muddler minnow. First he cuts off the hook point with a wire cutter, then carefully smooths the jagged stump with a file. He wraps the shank with synthetic yarn, then spins on a bunch of moose hair that flares to form the head and collar of the fly. He soaks the fly in water and burns the long ends of moose hair off to the length of the hook, leaving a smell in the air that led one of his pals to dub it the Burnt Toast. Without a hook point to keep it in the mouth of a fish, one fly will survive months of fishing.