“We’re going to fish the Sandy for late winter steelhead. It’s dropping hard. With the rains we’ve had, there could be a good push of late fish. We’re fishing with an expert,” Robert Campbell told me the night before. “Are you ready for hairy whitewater?”

“Never heard of him. Cool name, though.”

Campbell’s expert was no less than Jason Hambly, from Lamiglas fishing rods. We set it up to meet at a parking lot in Sandy and run from Dodge Park to Oxbow in the morning.

I had fished the Sandy River with Robert Campbell before, so I knew what to expect. That day, Campbell, manager of the Fisherman’s Marine store in Oregon City, carried three rods and a backpack with 30 pounds of gear. We hit the river before daylight and waded several runs in the dark to get first water.

On the Sandy, with a boat to carry the load, I expected Campbell to come well-armed. He was, with graphite spinning rods, casting rods and a 1970s vintage Garcia fiberglass stick sporting a Zebco Cardinal 4. Rigged with spoons, drift gear or floats, each rod was ready for action.

Not to be outdone, Hambly brought five of his own rods. I laid my spinning setup next to a dozen other rods and looked to my perch.

A pontoon boat is not properly classified as a boat, in my opinion. Rather, it’s a modern version of Tom Sawyer’s raft. Hambly, who has launched some well-known anglers from the front seats of his craft, warned me: “When we start down through the whitewater, you’re going to want to hang on to the boat. I’ll show you where Dave Eng and my dad went in the river. That day was a lot colder than this one.”

You put your feet on an aluminum bar, wedge your rear into the seat and try not to look down, because there is no floor. We donned our life jackets and pointed downstream into the rollers. A big wave came over the pontoon and drenched me to the eyebrows. A half-gallon of 43-degree snowmelt went down the front of my waders.

Ah yes, that Harry Whitewater. Know him well.

We drifted beneath the big green pipeline and pulled in to the bank, river left. Campbell handed me a Lamiglas rigged with a Thill float and a pearl leadhead jig threaded through a bubblegum-pink plastic worm.

A tactic responsible for the undoing of many a British Columbia sea-run rainbow, fishing pink plastic under a float has become fashionable on rivers in the western United States. I had employed smaller versions of the bait for resident rainbows, but never for steelhead.

“Let’s let Lewis get the first fish,” Campbell said. “Stand there,” he pointed. “The fish will be between that rock and the riffle.” I love it when people talk to me that way.

Third cast, as far as I could throw it. The line swept down on the surface current in a large belly and I lifted the rod tip for an upstream mend. My float went down, straight down, out of sight. When I swept the rod up and over my head, a fish rolled — a flash of silver in green water.

After a few minutes, I guided a 7-pound native into the shallows. The pink worm trailed out of her mouth. For a moment we admired the fish, then we watched her kick away.

Downstream, in a long, deep run, Hambly stood on a high rock and cast across, feathering the inside of an unseen ledge. When he set the hook, a husky hatchery fish flashed. Five minutes later, Hambly brought the 8-pound female to hand. One for the freezer.

We paddled to the far bank and worked the ledge from a different angle. My float plunged. Three head-shakes later, the line broke at the knot and the last thing I saw of that fish was the pink worm in its jaw and a broad tail that broke the surface as it turned away.

Campbell’s first fish took a pink Okie Drifter with white yarn in the tailout of a long run. This one was fresh, chrome, probably 10 days out of Astoria. Campbell played it skillfully to keep Harry Whitewater from claiming it in the rapids.

We bounced over submerged boulders, through rock gardens and narrow chutes where the water stood tall. “That’s where Dave and my dad went in the river,” Hambly said. I held on, not wishing to have my name added to the local lore.

Seven fish for eight hookups. The only thing better than catching steelhead in winter is catching winter steelhead in late March and early April.

When the snowmelt runs cold, and those chrome and rainbow rockets charge upstream to their ancestral spawning grounds, bubblegum pink is my favorite color.