The experience of bringing an adult steelie to hand with my fly rod was so overwheming it was as if I was caught in the throes of an extreme ailment not unlike a fever. In order to quench the malaise, an angler just has to go fishing, right? Otherwise how could I shake the sleepless nights, or the constant thinking of when and where to go next? How could I find the money for more gear. and when will I stop getting the sweats? Almost as bad as the beginning of a love affair!
Well I did all of those things and more trying to recapture the euphoria of hooking another steelie on my fly rod. But do you know what? I wouldn’t bring another steelhead to hand by fly casting for a very long time. I did manage to catch plenty of other smaller trout, and some of them were quite lovely, but the raw thrill of a steelhead would elude me.
What to Do?
I did catch more steelhead, and began to be pretty knowledgeable about how and where they would be, but hooked by a fly just couldn’t make it. I would bait cast when the frustration set in. I always had two outfits with me and resorted to the spin reel set up. I found worms, sand shrimp, and roe would always get results. Then my dad sent me these thingys made by a friend of his at work called Glo Bugs.
The Glo Bugs worked great with pretty much any color in the assortment dad sent. I even tried to use them with the fly casting outfit, but the darn little yarn thingys wouldn’t get down deep enough. As a matter of fact the thingys actually floated on the top. I was pretty certain the Glo Bugs needed to get down, so I just drifted them with lead. I tried putting shot on my fly leader too, but only succeeded in bonking myself in the back of the head with it! “*$@*” was a topic of foul air when this happened!
At least my steelhead fever was quieted down from using other angling techniques, and I really began studying the fish I was pursuing. This course of study lead me back to the salmon fishing I did with my dad earlier in life. The rivers I was fishing has a run of salmonid called a Silver. In some other areas these same salmon are called Coho. These salmon were much different than the Chinook salmon I had caught on the Sacramento, and Trinity rivers. These fish traveled in a large school that was in one spot one day, and then gone a couple days after. I learned to chase them up river.
Difference between steelhead trout and Coho salmon.
The first year I tried to follow the silvers up the Sandy river in Oregon, I lost them after about a week. No matter where I went on the Sandy could I find them, and none of the other guys would say anything. They had major lockjaw. The second year was different, because I spent the time to study the watershed, and found a tributary to the Sandy. The salmon went up that creek to the hatchery they were spawned in.
That is all for now, but I will follow this with a little more of the Silvers, and an introduction of the Deschutes River Redsides trout in a few days. Stay tuned for more whopper stories here at Ketchinnee.
Mr Hook