Every March I head to Erie, Pennsylvania with a group of fly fishing buddies (“the steelhead crew”) to chase spring run steelhead. We’ve been making the trip for five years now and each time we get better at understanding the tributaries, finding fish, and catching them. This past weekend was the 2017 spring trip. Last week flew by and before long I was packing my truck with gear and looking at online steelhead reports out of Erie. Jack York’s Twitter feed was saying the creeks would be ice locked until Saturday and every post that went up on the Fish Erie thread made the weekend sound less and less promising. At one point I was texting the steelhead crew and seeing if they wanted to postpone our trip. After thirty minutes of back and forth, my enthusiastic friend Matt said we should just go and see what we find. And after I thought about, I realized that almost every trip we’ve taken to Erie has involved some type of uncertainty with weather, fish numbers, or water levels. It was settled, we were going to Erie, ice or no ice.