Spring Steel

Relatively low water made for great spring steelhead fishing from March through May, here are the highlights.

Red Stripe

One for the table

Absolutely perfect swung fly fish -  tight swing, huge tug and lots of reel music.

Sunrise on the Betsie

The Rouge

Feenstra's BTS

Lost a great fish when the rear hook bent out...oh well.

grate·ful

Lady Caroline

I've been both enamored and intimidated by this pattern since the first time I saw it. Unlike most things, I didn't jump right into it. I've been trying out the different elements of this fly over the last year or so. Here's my first attempt. Lots of mistakes, but rather than strip the materials off and start over, I think I'll use this for Smallmouth Bass.

Beauly Snow Fly

Fisherman's Fall

"These are places beyond price or substitute, it is time to look after them for their own values."

Summer Flies

A few of the summer flies I've been using on a skagit "dry line". I've got my 11-foot 6-weight dialed in nicely with a 390 grain Airlfo Skagit Switch and a Medium floating MOW tip. Cast easily out to 70-80 feet using sustained anchor casts.

Lost a nice fish!

I sent a couple of flies through the main run I was fishing this morning, rested it and then came back with a smaller chartreuse comet.  I swung it through a slick where I'd gotten a little bump earlier.  This fish was right where I'd expected him to be, I hooked up and brought him to hand - a little smallmouth.  After a few more casts, I snagged my fly on a log or rock or something on my cast setup.  I ended up breaking the hook off trying to get it out.

Needing a new fly, I switched to a black and blue version of this new "spey" type streamer pattern I've been working on.

Fly inspired by Feenstra's Blackcherry "Spey" and Jay Nicolas's "Winter Simplicity"

Up until today I hadn't seen any sign of summer fish yet this year, then out of no where, I hooked into a nice big bright fish.  She hit the fly hard and came out of the water...and then....my knot broke.  I've had a few non-slip mono loop knots break on me like this, mostly with carp.  I think I tend to get sloppy with them and don't make sure the mono is jammed up tight.  That first big tug pulls it tight and it snaps, either that or just didn't tie it right.  In any case, I think I'm going to be leaning heavily on the palomar knot this season...that's a little more difficult to mess up.

Spring

Long Winter, Long Shadows

Elvis has left the building!

We've hopefully seen the last of the salmon waving their white flags.  The egg bite is over and the swung fly is back.  This early morning hen crushed my black and blue scandi style tube and then proceeded with a good minute or so of spastic acrobatics all over the place.  Got to hear my Hardy (Sage) sing for the first time with a chromer on the end of the line.

  

Fall Steel

This rocket ship of a hen crushed my Aquatic Nuisance style Bad Hair Day. Nice hook set and then she took off. Some lighting fast runs and amazing classic acrobatics. After putting a little pressure on her, trying turn her back towards me, she burst into the shallow water and amazingly beached herself right where I normally try to land bigger fish in this run. Snapped a few photos and a got her back into the current. She was pretty exhausted. It was really neat to watch her for a little while under water as I was reviving her in the current. Such amazing looking fish. In the future I think I'm just going to try to tail fish in the current and snap a few photos rather than walking them towards a shallow bank. It's so much better for the fish and just looks neater, plus the photos that I take at the bank usually suck anyways.

End of Summer (run)

I was swinging a black and blue Bad Hair Day streamer through my favorite run at first light this morning and this guy smashed it mid swing. Great hook set and a fairly quick, but heart pounding, battle on my 6wt switch rod. After a few runs and some crazy Chinook style, stiff as a board acrobatics, I got him in the net. Snapped a few pictures, broke the tip off my rod in the process and got him back in the water. This was the biggest steelhead I've ever caught (~30 inches), and likely the biggest freshwater fish I'd ever brought to hand, except for a couple foul hooked, half-dead Chinooks that were incidentals while stripping streamers for fall browns.

After he took off, I walked back to the bank, sat down and took it all in. I've been consumed with trying to make this happen for weeks (maybe more like months or years). This was the best end result I could have hoped for. All the countless hours of fishing, my efforts with fly tying, rigging, researching and reading stuff online. Living and breathing swung flies, spey rods and steelhead...all for exactly this.

Bobber Fishin'

I've heard that people put bobbers on their fly rods and fish for steelhead.  Personally, I'd never do it.  It probably doesn't really work. Even if it does work,  I'm confident that most fish prefer to get stuck in the face with a piece of sharp metal from a traditionally swung and beautifully tied fly, rather than some haphazardly tied glo-bug or stonefly nymph.  That being said, if a person did want to indicator nymph (as I've heard it called), I guess that doing it like the guys in the following video would be an o.k. way to go about it.

All kidding aside, I don't know the guys in this video, but they're on top of it! Their presentation and mending looks great and their fish handling (note that he wets his hand before grabbing the fish's belly) and release are better than what you often see on our rivers, especially from guys this age.



If more people would take a few hours and actually learn how to fish like these guys, I'm confident we'd have a lot less snagging on our rivers.  Maybe even more respect for the rivers and fish and in turn a lot less beer cans and garbage left on the river after the salmon and steelhead army departs the rivers for deer season (ok, maybe that's a stretch).

To that end, here are a couple videos by Mike Schultz and PureMichigan showing how it's done.

"Steel" Your Face from anadromy.com

These came in the mail today from the folks at anadromy.com!

Lee Spencer Moose Hair Muddler "Burt Toast"

When I first read "American Muddler" by John Larison in the Spring 2013 issue of the Drake, I was blown away by one of the characters.  This guy who spends the better part of each year camped out in front the "Dynamite Hole"  a pool on Steamboat Creek (one of the North Umpqua's spawning tributaries) where wild steelhead stack up and become vulnerable to poachers.

If that wasn't enough, the guy also fishes with a simple muddler that he cuts the hook point off of!
I find this sort reflective approach to fishing (or really anything) amazingly cool.

Come to find out, this wasn't just some character dreamed up by Larison, that embodied  a particular spirit of Pacific Northwest steelehading, this was an actual guy, Lee Spencer.  His efforts at guarding the "Dynamite Hole" are supported by the North Umpqua foundation (northumpqua.org).

The Moose Hair Muddler is just a simple antron yarn body with a single clump of moose body hair for both a collar and head. Rather than trimming the head Spencer say to wet the fly and then burn the head to shape with a lighter...the tips are hit with a lighter to reduce the wings size and likely cauterize the fibers, increasing bouncy.  I gave this a shot, but I was only able to get the sort of muddler head I like on two out of maybe 5 or so flies that I tried.


This muddler pattern really clicks with me, I've tied up a few more using angora goat dubbing for the body and scissor trimmed moose hair for the head.  This is going to become my go to muddler pattern.  I've taken them swimming once so far and had a really great response from my local smallmouth.

Moose Hair Muddler Recipe
Lawrence Journal World Article
Lee Spencer: USA Today Article

Losing a good fish

At dawn nearly everyday for the past few weeks I'd been stalking a pod of stray Skamania Steelhead that had made their way into the Flat River.  Today I finally got a solid hookup on a swung red and white bad hair day streamer.
The fish crushed the fly and I had a great hook set (and a couple more for good measure).  He took off upstream towards the dam.  I kept the tension on but let him run (like I had a choice) while trying to work my way to a shallower spot on the river where I could attempt to land him.

He ran up under the dam and the fluid tension of having the fish on the line changed to solid, static and hopeless.  I moved around to different angles,  hoping my line was just hung up on something.  After a few minutes with no change in the situation, I swallowed my fate and did the inevitable, I grab my Skagit line, wrapped it around my hand a few time and started to yank.  Eventually the line broke free with no fish or fly on the end. 

I'm pretty sure I'd hooked up with the big buck that had just porpoised a few minutes earlier in the spot where my fly got grabbed.  To further confirm this, I saw him jump again from nearly the same spot where I broke my line off a minute or two after everything went down.

I can take some consolation in that I'm pretty sure I saw this same fish come unpinned in a wonderful acrobatic display from a Mepps spinner a guy was throwing the day before.

Here is John Larison's take on the situation : A Steelheader Farms Another One

"What happened next, I’ll never know for sure, though I have some suspicions. The line came tight, suddenly and abnormally tight, and then it wasn’t the animate flex of a fish I felt but the firm resonance of current parting over fly line. I leapt onto a rock to change the angle, and felt the resonance increase to a hum. And then felt nothing."

Sometimes nothing is the heaviest thing of all."

Back on the Little Manistee

Such a nice river.

Things you find on the river and/or stuck in a salmon this time of year  in Michigan

Juvenile Steel -  Hopper Eater

Stray Skamania Steelhead

Saw a group of steelhead trying to ascend the dam this morning.  Assuming they're stray Skamania from Indiana.   The DNR fishing report says that steelhead have been caught at Sixth Street dam on the Grand.

End of Spring Steelhead Season 2013

I'm officially done chasing chrome until the summer runs starts...next month.  I hope to hit the St. Joe for the first time this summer.  On my last trip searching for steelhead, I caught this obese little brown on a swung Kevin Fennstra fly - the psycho sculpin. I was using a bass/bullet weight to get it down fast.

I'm surprised by how many of these aggressive little  10"-12" browns there are in the lower Rouge right now.  Imagine if they made a section catch and release only...we'd have a bunch of big aggressive browns in a few years.

Spring Hen Post 2013 Flood

Got this little smallstream hen on a swung Greenbutt Skunk I tied. This was the first real fishing opportunity after the major flooding we had this spring.  The psycho-killer face I'm making is coming from a mix of just wading through knee deep muck and talking to the guy who ran over to talk to me about the fish.  He ended up taking the pseudo-hero shoot...I was hoping to just take some cool macro photos of her in the water...but he thought this would be a better idea.