STEAMBOAT, Ore. (AP) — Back in 1998 Lee Spencer did two things that changed his relationship with the big steelhead of the North Umpqua River.

He agreed to become the first full-time FishWatch guardian of the Big Bend Pool on Steamboat Creek, where as many as 400 large steelhead spend the summer in startlingly plain sight after swimming up the North Umpqua to spawn.

And he started cutting the points off the hooks on his flies.

Even people who know Spencer wonder why he would want to spend summers on Steamboat Creek 12 miles upstream from the nearest pay phone watching fish wait.

"No one else would do it," said Joe Howell, owner of the Blue Heron Fly Shop in Idleyld Park.

It is even harder to understand why the 57-year-old would cut the points off his hooks and file the wire stump smooth — denying himself the satisfaction of controlling, touching and ultimately setting free something so wild and beautiful.

"I was uncomfortable fishing," Spencer said. "I like these fish too much to kill them, even accidentally, or even to stress them out, unduly.

"It took me a month or a month and a half to not want to see the fish up close," he added. "I am not proselytizing fishing pointless, but my fishing is as good or better than it ever has been, as far as my own satisfaction."

Western writer and gentleman sportsman Zane Grey proclaimed the North Umpqua the America's premier fishing river in a 1935 article in Sports Afield magazine. He landed 64 fish in the summer of 1934, casting down and across with a wet fly on a floating line and allowing it to swing back across the current in the British tradition of fly-fishing for Atlantic Salmon. His son, Loren, landed 100.

Still, the author wrote, "It was the steelhead I raised and could not hook, and those that I hooked and could not land, which counted."

Spencer's best season was that summer of 1998. A field archaeologist, he had saved enough money from his last dig to spend the summer camped in the fly-fishing-only section of the North Umpqua. It had taken him seven years of trying to catch his first North Umpqua steelhead on a fly. By 1998 he was good enough to raise 77 steelhead in 102 days of fishing and land about half of them. He had intended to release every one unharmed, whether wild or hatchery born, but killed three — two were bleeding from the gills and a third got disoriented and went belly-up out of his reach. A fourth left its eyeball on his hook.