Anglers can debate forever whether steelhead feed in freshwater, and if they do, whether it is caused by residual instinct from the freshwater period in their lives, rather than by true hunger. Whatever the conclusion, many fly patterns and other artificials that represent food items and even bait, do catch steelhead.

Fly tiers in the Great Lakes region and on the Pacific Coast have tied many patterns that are clearly intended to imitate the steelhead’s food, both marine and freshwater. Shrimp patterns like the General Practioner and Squamish Poacher, nymph patterns like the Michigan Wiggler and Stonefly, and surface patterns like the October Caddis and Telkwa Stone have all proved their worth. Over the years, I’ve caught many fish in the Skeena region on nymphs and waking surface flies, in addition to the traditional attractor patterns. I was convinced, however, that fishing a dry fly in the traditional, upstream, dead-drift fashion was a waste of time, if I wanted to catch steelhead.
In Fisherman’s Summer, Roderick Haig-Brown describes how he discovered that steelhead would take a floating fly while he was fishing in late August for cutthroat trout in a pool on the Campbell River, just upstream of his house. He cast a large Grey Wulff into the head of the glide and hooked a three-pound steelhead. As he continued to experiment, he became convinced that not only would even relatively large steelhead rise to the floating fly, but in shallow, faster water, it would outfish the wet fly.

He decided to tie a darker fly in the Wulff style, with bulky hair wings split and set forward, a bulky tail of the same hair and sparse hackles. He was convinced that a larger body floating in, rather than on, the water’s surface did a better job of attracting the steelhead, and he thought that if a No. 8 worked, a No. 6 would be even better. Further experiments proved this to be the case.

Later in the book, Haig-Brown writes about fishing a fly he first called the Yellow Bug — that came to be called the Steelhead Bee — dead drift, upstream for summer steelhead on the Campbell and other Vancouver Island streams. He clearly designed this pattern in imitation of the bees or yellow jackets that he occasionally found in the stomachs of steelhead. With its fox squirrel tail and wings, and thickly dubbed fur body in alternating bands of brown, yellow, brown, it is a passable imitation of a bee or wasp.
Even Haig-Brown admits that “deliberate drag,” as he calls it, namely twitching the fly, or skipping it across the current, will entice reluctant fish, but he saw these techniques as a last resort, to be tried only after a dead-drift presentation had failed. I thought that the Skeena River and its tributaries were much larger than coastal streams, and since we were fishing for later-run fish, anglers in the North couldn’t expect to attract steelhead to the surface on anything but a waking fly.

My friend Rob Brown planted the seed that changed my mind when he told me that he had seen steelhead feeding on mayfly duns in the upper waters of a Skeena tributary in late summer, early fall. I dismissed this as an interesting anecdote until one day in early September. The water was as low, clear and warm as it was ever going to be. There were lots of insects hatching, but the main one was a medium-sized, dark mayfly. Although I was fishing for steelhead, I became interested in the many trout I saw rising to feed on the mayfly duns that were drifting and struggling on the river’s surface. I was considering going back to the car to get my trout rod, when I heard a splash downstream that was far too large
for a trout.>>

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