Skating for Steelhead
The steelhead held midstream, a gray ghost tucked behind a pumpkin-size boulder. The white of its mouth flashed as it picked at drifting morsels—an active fish, ready to see a fly.
Peter and I were fishing a well-known freestone river with gliding runs divided by sections of heavy whitewater. The weekend brought out fly anglers, most swinging flies with Spey rods or nymphing with indicators. The fish were there, yet few anglers bragged of hook-ups.
As we watched, our steelhead left its lie, slicing up through the current with its eyes locked on an October caddis drowning in the surface film. With the calm precision of a New Zealand brown trout, the steelhead poked its nose up and replaced the caddis with a single bubble the size of a quarter.
“Pinch me,” I said. “This can’t be real.”
“Pinch yourself,” Peter replied. “I’ve got rigging to do.”
It was Peter’s turn to cast, so I took a position in the bushes while he knotted on a new pattern. His first cast placed the fly upstream of the fish. Under tension, the fly threw a wake like a miniature speedboat. But the steelhead didn’t move.
“Three feet farther,” I called.
The next cast looked perfect. As the fly skated nearby, the fish’s flittering pectoral fins froze, then angled up, bringing the steelhead on a direct path to meet the swinging fly. The fish went cross-eyed right below the hook point, and just when I was sure the steelhead had realized the fraud its mouth opened, and a gulp of the surface vanished down its throat.
Peter gave the fish slack, allowing it to turn back toward its lie. When it finally came tight, the fish exploded through the surface, a chrome car fender contorting above the green current. Peter climbed to the bank and the fish went airborne again, this time in a sidelong sailfish skip. A few minutes later, I tailed the wild 26-inch hen with the dry fly hanging from her lip.
While the majority of West Coast summer steelhead are hooked subsurface, skating dry flies remains an effective—yet often neglected—method for hooking fish under certain conditions. On many rivers, guides trust skating tactics more than any other technique. Knowing when and how to employ surface presentations can be the key to beaching fish when other anglers are getting skunked.
Finding Surface-Oriented Fish
Not all steelhead are created equal; each river system produces unique fish, and the steelhead in some rivers are more receptive to skated dry flies than others.
Most anglers believe that a skating pattern triggers a reflex that was instilled in a steelhead when it was a juvenile. Depending upon the fertility of their natal stream, steelhead spend between two and four years in fresh water before they migrate to the ocean. In these years, they feed much like trout, and these experiences influence their behavior when they return as adults.
Caddis are a staple of a juvenile steelhead’s diet, and rivers with frequent and dense caddis hatches usually produce the best dry-fly steelheading. Many female caddis species return to the river carrying tiny egg sacs. They drag their abdomens on the meniscus to release eggs into the water, drawing the attention of eager juvenile steelhead. Skating presentations match this event, as well as the skittering behavior of some stoneflies, and mayfly duns blown across the water by the wind.
Generations of prolific caddis hatches on tributaries of the upper Columbia, such as the Deschutes and Grande Ronde, have produced steelhead crazy for dry-fly presentations. Ichthyologists call the subspecies of rainbow trout that inhabit these waters Oncorhynchus mykiss gairdneri, or redband rainbows. Steelheaders know the anadromous form as a fish that often refuses dozens of sunken presentations only to viciously attack the first surface fly placed nearby. Redband country is dry-fly country.
Hatchery steelhead, on the other hand, can be poor dry-fly quarry. A youth spent gorging on trout pellets doesn’t instill the same proclivity for surface presentations.
Copyright © 2012 Intermedia Outdoors
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