RWONWF: Seeing The Good

Editor’s note: This December marks our 6th Annual Real Women of Northwest Fishing, and this year’s is our biggest yet! As always, we hope this popular feature helps tell the stories of how local gals got into fishing and what they get out of the sport.

From discovering a new passion to helping bring more women into the sport to deckhanding and captaining their own boats to competing in tournaments, 2015’s ladies share why they love fishing here. While the reasons are many, Tammy Morgan summed it up most concisely: “I fish because I love it!”

Enjoy this year’s edition of Northwest Sportsman’s Real Women of Northwest Fishing!

By Toni Pollock-Bozarth

The beginning of forums and social media on the Internet has opened up several ways for anglers to keep up to date on catching reports. This can also lead to what I call the good, bad, and the ugly of the ’Net. I am only going to concentrate on the good.

My initial contact with Brianna Bruce was in the online fishing forums several years ago. We met face to face at the Sportsman Show in Puyallup, while I helped with the Washingtonlakes.com booth. This led to a few fishing opportunities with Brianna before she even became a guide. I enjoyed myself, so when she, through her guide service Livin’ Life Adventures, offered a special for 2015’s pink salmon run on the Snohomish River, I booked the boat.

2015 has been a year of both health issues and outboard motor problems for me, so I wasn’t able to go fishing as much as I wanted to. Therefore, the Snohomish trip was much anticipated. I took my brother Richard Pollock, sister-in-law Kim Elliott and my 8-year-old grandson William. Brianna had hurt her back, so her fiancée Cody Servo came aboard to help her out.

During this trip, William got his first salmon, and Brianna let him bonk all the fish on the head. She was extra patient with him as he tried to reel the fighting pink salmon in on a 7-foot rod. His best moment was when he reeled in a salmon on the 6-foot rod-and-reel combo I brought for him to use. He was very excited and named that fish Wiley!

That trip was so fun that when Brianna advertised for an all-girls trip on Facebook, I joined in. Another girl on this trip was my Facebook friend Cynthia Seafeldt, whom I had never met face to face before. Brianna taught us how to reel the lure through the slot where we got our limits. Cynthia had never hooked a salmon before, but with the instructions from Brianna, she did. She reeled that fish in while she was jumping up and down with joy! Since then Cynthia has caught several salmon in the rivers, and says of Brianna, “I always repeat in my head how she taught me to reel in.”

Without Internet fishing forums and social media, we would not have had these great experiences.