Fly tying: The Steelhead Woolly Bugger

 

The first steelhead I caught was in Idaho's Salmon River right above Slate Creek on a warmish April afternoon several years back. Some friends and I had fished for a few days, and while I'd been close a couple of times, I hadn't been able to bring a fish to hand. I had one break off just before our guide got it to the net, and I hooked another but lost it in the single-digit morning temperatures because my reel had literally frozen solid. 

 

It was maddening. 

 

Then, on the last afternoon, with the weather warming up into the 40s and 50s, I drifted a polar shrimp through the run right above the wedding of Slate Creek and the Salmon, and I finally hooked and landed a fat, wild steelhead that had made its way into the Columbia some eight months earlier about 800 miles downstream. It was a cathartic moment in my fly fishing existence. The fish, born in this river, made it past five dams on the Lower Snake River—twice—swam up the Washington coast into Canadian waters, and possibly even made it up and around the northern edge of the Ring of Fire, ending its outgoing journey somewhere off the coast of Russia. And then it came back to spawn in the waters where it was born. 

 

And it fell for a Polar Shrimp tied at my vise a week or so before. 

 

Steelhead flies can be obnoxious things. Tubes sporting long, gawdy, purple maribou; size 2 pink and orange creations that look, perhaps through Picasso's eye, like a baitfish or a shrimp... there's no end to the creativity—and the bad taste—fly anglers will employ at the vise in order to get these notoriously closed-mouth fish to bite.

 

 

But Tim Flagler reminded me of something recently. Steelhead started their lives in the fresh water, eating natural river-dwelling prey, like stonefly nymphs, small sculpins and other entomological and piscene critters. I once caught a steelhead on a Prince Nymph, size 6, dead drifted through a run on the Clearwater. It makes sense that these memories haunt these mighty fish, so why wouldn't they instinctively hit something from their younger lives as they matured. 

 

Tim suggests we try something simple, like his toughened up Woolly Bugger pattern he demontrates above. Trout of all kinds eat 'Buggers, and steelhead, Flagler reminds us, are no different. On my next trip to the Salmon, I'll have a few these great flies on hand.