Catch more Steelhead, guaranteed.

With many years of fishing very hard to beat my dad’s 31 and 32 in day, and having no success catching Steelhead I figured out what not to do and boy was it worth it. The most significant tip I can give people is by asking a question. Are you fishing deep enough? Most will answer yes, and a heavy majority of those folks who said yes and are not catching fish are frankly not fishing deep enough… You could have the wrong bait. You could be fishing the wrong style. You could have too much drag in your line. You could not be fishing hard enough. You could be in unproductive spots. You could have the wrong color. You could be too noisy. It could be too sunny. It could be too cloudy. It could be too cold, or to hot, or to wet, or to dry.

It could be any of the one million things I thought up, that I could be doing wrong. A LOT of the time it is simply not getting deep enough. How can I blanket that and answer so blindly to all the folks out there who are not catching fish? I can, because that was me. Not being deep enough and not setting the hook when I saw the indicator (bobber) so much as think about twitching. I dealt with this problem, not catching ANY fish, for so many years that I completely gave up nymphing “the most productive way to steelhead fish”. I bought a switch rod and went over to swinging flies.

What I found very quickly is that when I added a sink tip onto the end of my floating fly line, and then added a length of tippet to it and then to a weighted fly. I could now “feel” or “touch” the bottom. Casting across stream, nope not quartering downstream I can never do what I am told or everyone else is traditionally doing, mending a nice loop and then following the fly with the tip of my rod and keeping a bit of feel in the line as to feel any rocks, hits or branched I might find. Sure enough I started catching fish, I didn’t catch a ton but I now averaged a fish an outing and that’s a whole heck of a lot better than going 10 years without catching any!

Weighted, olive buggers, with big orange dubbing heads tied on a 4x long shanks streamer hook was my go-to lure. White, black, and quite a few other flies worked too but my confidence fly was most definitely an olive bugger “egg sucking leach” with an orange or chartreuse dubbing head. This worked for a couple seasons and then I got greedy and wanted these 10-20 fish days I hear about from guys in the industry that I respect. Invariably, I needed to come full-circle and figure out what the heck I was doing wrong though when it came to indi-rigging.

I reached out to a guide online and told him I was not interested in him guiding me, but instead for him to allow me to dump all the knowledge on him about steelheading that I have and him to tell me why I can’t connect the dots on nymphing for them. We went back and forth for a few emails, and then he agreed to get my broke-college-arz out onto the river for a steeply reduced half-day rate to watch me fish and see what it is I might be doing wrong. I arrived, geared up, showed him all my gear and told him my first thought would be to tandem rig a bugger or something larger with an egg trailing behind it.

The first thing he taught me and pointed out was not all my drifts were perfect dead drifts, and that on the whole my mending was okay but needed work. He showed me with a few drifts how to “stack mend”, which helped my drifts significantly. A few more go by and he says this is his honey-hole and I should’ve had a hook up by now. He asks me to reel up and allow him to inspect my rig. I get ten inches above the water and he goes you need more lead, he didn’t count the split shot or ask what size they were- he just knew. I asked if one more would be enough, he said no put two more on and hit that seam again. Something like the magic of your missing wallet appearing in that place you checked ten times on your way out the door, I caught a steelhead… Right there I learned the power of one more shot, when in doubt get it down! You can’t be positive there are fish in any given hole, but you can be positive that if they are they are on the bottom using the “hydro-cushion” to catch a breather and get some easy snacks. 

I have since mixed these two styles of fishing and then improved upon it, to an extent I will not disclose at this time. I will say this much though, an indicator is nice, but with one you cannot easily tell what is happening below your line and you have now added a hinge to your rig making strike detection that much harder. Going without an indicator allows you to feel when you’re tapping the bottom and when a cold water fish taps your fly. It also allows you to use just enough weight to get down and not too much, as the extra feel means you can tell if you’re tapping bottom often enough or too often.

I hope this helps get you on more fish and b no means am I trying to steer you away from indi fishing, however, I do believe many, many times folks on the water aren’t catching fish because they just are not deep enough.