A week of Chrome
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I have spent the past week fishing in several states for steelhead. Started out with taking a group from the shop to Ohio to fish with the guys at Steelhead Alley Outfitters. Everyone in the group had never caught a steelhead before, so this was a nice introduction to steelhead. We fished for two days over near Conneaut. I shadowed one of the groups and fished a little here and a little there. Everyone caught some fish and hooked into a good number of fish. We fished in Ohio one day and in PA the other day. We ended up fishing the Elk in PA and I must say that is a very unique fishery. One of the guys landed a 14.25 lb. PA fish. That is on the large size for those guys and it was only 28″ long. I used this trip to also break in a new rod, 6wt. Z-axis switch. I baptized the rod with a nice Little Manistee strain hen on the Ashtabula.
I also went up to Michigan today for some steelhead. Ended up swinging streamers and caught this nice hen. Not a bad birthday present for myself.
I ended up hooking several other fish on the swing, but no solid takes. I even had a fish bend a hook straight while I was nyphing a run. Never got to see the fish but I bet it must of been in the double digits. All in all not a bad way to spend the week.Nice.
Dave,
Shape of the fish and time of run. The fish in Erie are mostly London strain or Little Manistee fish in Ohio. Pennsylvania mostly gets there own strain. Which look like London strain, but they are refered to “mutt” steelhead, since they have been engineered more or less. The easiest way to tell is the body shape and the time of year of the run. Also your location matters. London’s have a deep body and small heads. Both the fish I have in the pics are Manistee fish. I will admit that it sometimes gets hard, especially when you have several strains in one system.
Interesting. I have caught maybe a thousand steelhead (I grew up on the shores of lake erie, fishe dthem on flies since the days of cohos) but never really thought too much about “strains” even though none of them belong there, they came from somewhere, right?!
What about time of year you mention.
Dave,
The time of the year really depends on the region you are fishing and the strains available. For example here in the Lake Michigan systems we mostly recieve runs of Skamania and Little Manistee steelhead. The Skamania start staging in May and push throughout the summer into the systems. They will remain in the systems until spring when they spawn. The Little Manistee start their run in the late fall and stay until the spring as well. So it is possible to catch the two strains at the same time during the winter and spring, but if you catch a steelhead during the summer here it is a skam.
Not many states are fin clipping any more but it sounds like a upcoming project may bring it back to some degree.
I agree that the fish in the second picture is a Manistee…the first one is a bit harder to tell.
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