Swinging New York Salmon

Spey casting for Great Lakes salmon and steelhead is kind of a fools errand. The fish aren't like native salmon, they leave a freshwater lake and enter a freshwater river... by the time they get in front of anglers they've mostly already gone though their transition into spawn-focused automatons. There's a reason you can find videos galore of Alaskan cohos smashing topwater flies and none of that from the Great Lakes. They're long done with that by the time they come in. There's also to many damn people. Even in the Douglaston Salmon Run. You can't really rotate when there's a dozen nymphers standing in the run, flogging the same water for hours. The fish also see more flies than any fish should ever have to see. If they were actually native, I'd have a huge problem with the ethics of it, but since they're introduced my problem with it is completely selfish- I want to fish for them the way I want to fish for them, and that just happens to be spey casting which requires room and the ability to cover water. 

So, all that said, there's no other way I'll fish for Great Lakes salmon and steelhead. Even if it's the hardest way. Hey, at least I know my fish ate when I hook one (yeah, I went there). There's very little better than that tight line grab, even if it only happens a few time in a whole day of fishing. 

Rick invited Charlie and I to go to Pulaski and fish the Douglaston Salmon Run again this fall. The weather was very different this go around. It was excessively warm for mid October, and that negatively impacted the fishing. We could easily have wet waded the water was so warm. The kings were around but a lot were entering the river less than fresh. Steelhead were far from numerous and mostly holding in very fast water. And there were of course lots of guys on the run as that week is often the peak, so space to swing was at a premium. I was lucky enough a few times to be able to rotate with a couple other spey casters or have enough water to myself to cover a bit of it before another angler slipped in in front of me, but I got a bit less lucky than last year. 

The fish I wanted most was an adult coho. I'd gotten my first swing steelie last fall and some juvenile cohos this winter. I really hoped for a big, chrome, fired up coho. I ended up getting just that. The fish ate a size 4 Ally's Shrimp and put on a fantastic fight. It was also properly chrome, more chrome I'd ever personally seen before. 

The next couple of fish were all ugly kings. One on an olive and black Intruder, one on a large grey Bugger, one on a Gartside Soft Hackle Streamer. They were in various states of decay. The freshest put up a ridiculous fight with loads of jumps before bolting downriver an forcing me to really reef on it to land it in a waste deep bank trough. 

The to most unusual and unexpected fish of the trip was a native species, a Northern hogsucker that grabbed a blue charm of all things. I love these goofy suckers and their odd black lip coloration. This was the first large one I've caught. My lifer was very small, caught in Western Pennsylvania last fall. This one was much more impressive.

For he next couple days, all I was able to get grabs from was kings, and not many kings at that. A couple of them were pretty seriously big at least. They weren't the best looking fish though. 

Rick and Charlie weren't spey casting and they weren't having fast fishing either. Charlie ended up being the hot hand though with unquestionably the best fish of the trip, and possibly a fish of a lifetime: a gorgeous chrome buck steelhead, a huge one, that took him on a hell of a ride. That's certainly the sort of fish I'd have loved to run into. Of course, I'll have more opportunities. I don't get out there much but I'm slowly figuring things out and refining my technique and fly selection. How many more times will I put up with all the nonsense? Probably way too many times. 

Until next time, 

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, C, Franky, Geof, Luke, Streamer Swinger, and Noah for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version.

The Agony of Swinging Steelhead

I picked Noah (Garth) up well before the sun rose and we started the drive to western New York. Our destination was the famous Salmon River and our target was steelhead. Perhaps more precisely, our target was lake run rainbows whose ancestors were steelhead. I’d fished the Salmon River twice already and caught steelhead on both trips, but this time it was my trip. Noah had never been, he had never fished for steelhead at all. This trip would put him closer to a salmonid over 30 inches than he’d ever been. Even though I’d been already, I had very little experience. This trip would test me. It would be my first real foray into Great Lakes steelheading. 

We got on the water around 9:00am, leaving us with most of the day to explore water that would mostly be new to both of us. We didn’t know exactly what to expect, other than a struggle. Winter steelheading pretty much always is. It would be especially so for me because I decided to dedicate myself to swinging. I faltered only a couple of times and fished with an indicator or sight cast with small streamers, but for the most part it was just big flies and spey casts. My other goal was to fish away from the crowds, outside of Altmar, and we managed to accomplish that. We walked a lot, though we didn’t actually need to. At times we found water devoid of fisherman right around the bridges. 

The weather was pleasant. It was only cold in the morning, and we took wading breaks because the water certainly wasn’t warm. The sky was clear though, and I didn’t think that helped the fishing. Yes, the fishing was slow. Very slow. We saw two other anglers hook fish and we saw steelhead, most of them tucked into log jams. We were struggling though, and by the evening of that first day I was expecting to skunk. 

Then, in the most promising run we found that day, I abruptly came tight. The fly was an olive and purple marabou pattern, a swing fly I’d had a steelhead take and caught a couple kings on back in the fall. The fish grabbed at the tail of the run, in a classic spot. I registered the take with astonishment, set the hook hard, and my spey rod doubled under the weight of a grumpy steelhead. Then I f’d up. The fish came to the surface and began violently head shaking, but I kept the rod high. The fly came out, and my heart plummeted.

It’s hard to express that feeling. Most people who don’t fish would just think it’s silly. But it was pure agony. I felt this deep sense of loss for the rest of the trip. We never came close to getting another steelhead. But that’s the game, and I’m proud that I managed a grab on a big fly when nobody was doing all that well, regardless of tactics. That certainly is a very bitter consolation though. I need to do more of this steelheading thing. 

Until next time, 

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, C, Franky, Geof, Luke, and Noah for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version. 

Salmon River Salmon and Steelhead: Becoming a Snob

Lake Ontario's native Atlantic salmon went extinct in the 1800's, for much the same reasons salmon all over the East Coast were suffering: dams, pollution, and overfishing. As seems to be human nature given just about any and all similar cases turn out the same, those in charge of such things immediately started trying to replace those Atlantics with something different. These attempts included the first stockings of Pacific salmon in Lake Ontario. These early attempts to establish cohos and chinooks failed, but hope was never truly lost, and when the extirpation of lake trout in the middle of the 20th century resulted in a huge boom and overpopulation of alewives the stockings again commenced. By 1974 a run had been established in New York's Salmon River. 

The early years of this fishery were, to put it politely, an absolute shit-show. People didn't believe the fish would voluntarily take a lure or bait, so they deliberately snagged them. Though already illegal and widely considered unfair chase on most waters, it remained common practice on Lake Ontario tributaries where salmon runs occurred until 1995. Fear of economic impacts to the now wildly popular fisheries was surpassed by the overwhelmingly obvious problems with such an unethical practice. Illegal activity, fist fights, harvesting salmon eggs for profit, and other such behavior were rampant. The snagging ban inevitably did cause a decrease in fishing effort but over time, as people discovered that the fish could indeed be caught on flies and bait if targeted the right way, it once again boomed. It is estimated that $201,000,000 is spent by anglers fishing the Salmon River annually. And though things have gotten more civilized, there is still a lot of buffoonery. My friend Rick invited me and fellow fish head Charlie to join him on a trip during the peak of the salmon run. We'd spend one day fishing the public water and two on the private Douglaston Salmon Run, giving us the chance to see both the chaotic and the more civilized side of this fishery. 

When Rick and I went to fish winter steelhead, we'd stayed well upriver, in and around Altmar. This time the idea was to fish further down where the fish were freshest. Not far above the Douglaston, Town Pool is one of the first holding spots above the private water. We just wanted to watch there, as this spot is rarely anything less than pure chaos. It was a fun show to watch, though I'm certainly not the type to want to take part in this sort of fishing. Fish were snagged, lines were crossed, and it was the furthest thing from socially distant. But the behemoth fish we could see in the waters below shed light on why it was this way. For most of these people, chances to catch fish of this size (in a small river no less) don't come that often and the allure surpasses the rest of the experiences that would make someone like myself turn their nose up to it. 

Snobbery, or some semblance of it, had already set in. 

We drove around a bit before settling in to fish at Pineville. I was eager to do some wandering and walk to try to get away from crowds. It turned out that this was possible, but it wasn't easy to find water that had both fish and less people. I know I never found any water that had both some fish and no people. But I did find some and less, and that seems to be about the best you can do.

My expectation were low that first day, but I tried a bit of everything some swinging big flies with my spey setup to nymphing and dredging eggs to sight fishing with small streamers. I hooked one fish while sight fishing, and it wasn't the one I was targeting but the more beat up individual it was next to. It made an unexpected move and I suddenly found myself attached to it by the dorsal fin. Try as I might, I couldn't roll cast the fly off of it, but the fish was fresh enough to put up a solid fight so I decided to use this as an opportunity to decipher the limitations of my tackle against these fish. I put as much pressure on the fish as I was willing to plucked my woolly bugger out as soon as it got close enough. From then on I decided to break fish off that were clearly snagged. 

When I made it back to where Rick and Charlie were, Rick was hooked up. I stood on the bridge to watch and shoot photos. Eventually the fish came unpinned, unfortunately, and by that time we were hungry and decided to head out

We got a pizza at Paulanjo's in Pulaski than headed to the hotel and eked out what precious little sleep we could. In the morning, we went to the Douglaston. After New York senator Doug Barclay got sick of fisherman trespassing and behaving despicably, on his large property on the lower reaches of the Salmon River, he turned his property into a private, regulated fishery. Anglers who are willing to can pay for the privilege of smaller crowds and better behavior on prime water under the watchful eye of the Douglaston's river keepers, who make sure everything is on the up n' up. 

I very quickly came to the conclusion that I'd never fish the public water on the Salmon during the mid fall season again. Yet another level of snobbery had been reached.

Rick and Charlie decided to settle in at one of the major pools, but the wandering itch was bugging me and wander I did. I spent some time in the riffles trying to get some chinooks holding in the pockets to react to flies, but I inevitably found my camera better at capturing these fish than my fly rods.

I wandered my way downriver before settling in to fish hard in a stretch that looked good but wasn't especially busy. I started out bouncing heavy flies, doing what basically everyone else was doing, and kept doing that for a while, through a couple missed fish and a couple intentional break-offs of fouled fish. As the day wore on though I began to bore of it. In time the pool cleared out nearly entirely, and I switched to the spey rod, started at the head, and began to cast and swing. 

10 casts in, my intruder got smoked. I swung and whiffed, and a chrome steelhead did one cartwheel in retaliation. I swore under my breath and my arms fell to my sides. That I had not expected, not so soon. That moment right there sold me completely. I was swinging for the rest of the trip. I felt affirmed half an hour later when a big dark king smoked my weird olive and purple fly and put up an admirable fight. It was my first chinook, my first Lake Ontario salmon, and my first salmonid approaching 20 pounds. 

Lifelist fish #178: Chinook salmon, Oncorhynchus tshawytscha. Rank Species

I had a couple more wonderful experiences with chinooks that day and the following. Very few of them ended with a fish to hand. The largest fish I hooked took a big yellow Gartside softackle streamer around sunset and was likely in the 40lb class. It roared off, leaving the run I hooked it in, the leaving the pool below it, then entering the next long run below that before turning, jumping, landing on my leader, and breaking off. I felt pretty under-gunned with my 11'6" 8wt. The next day a fish of similar size gave me the same sort of battle but this time I landed, unfortunately it turned out to be hooked outside the mouth, so though it was a gorgeous quite fresh beast of a fish I didn't photograph it. The first fish I'd hooked that day was also the same sort of gigantic male, but not on for very long and did definitely eat the fly, a huge pink marabou spey fly. After doing some crazy frantic runs; charging up, down, across and back but never for than 30 feet; it launched completely out of the water sideways and threw the fly. The image of a 35-40lb chinook two feet above the river, spray sparkling like shards of glass haloing it, and my fly falling out of its big toothy maw will forever be burned in my brain. 

Later on the second day I got the freshest king I'd been able to land. He was a little fellow, and almost fooled me into thinking he was a big brown trout. It was a pretty cool fish nonetheless. 

The fish that made the trip for me though came in the first evening on the Douglaston. I was working a bend very thoroughly, trying to drive one of the big kings or cohos I'd seen in there crazy to the point of snapping at my irritating white and grizzly swing fly. That didn't happen. Instead, my fly got crushed at the end of the swing, and a silver bullet came flying out of the water when I set the hook. It was a steelhead, a chrome psychopath, and it came upstream and went right by me spending more time in the air than in the water. My heart was pounding. The rest of the fight was pretty much a blur but I do know I was utterly floored by how hard this fish was fighting for its size. By some miracle, I got it to hand, and couldn't stop uttering expletives under my breath. This was my first fresh steelhead, my first steelhead on a streamer, and my first on the swing. It completed my transition to snobbery. My days of nymphs, split shot, and dredging up Great Lakes salmon and steelhead are probably over. It had never sat well with me anyway, I gravitated towards spey fishing in the same way I was drawn to fishing for Atlantic salmon and sea run trout with traditional flies and methods. It felt like it did the fish justice, as if the fish were made for the methods instead of the other way around. 

I'd never be so bold as to suggest superiority, I don't care how you catch your salmon and steelhead so long as it falls within the bounds of what is legal and fair-chase. Bait, center pinning, chuck and duck... they're all completely valid and ethical when done right. But for me, I can nymph trout, fallfish, bass, suckers, and other such species. I would like to swing my flies without additional weight for my migratory fish. It just feels right to me. That was my takeaway from this trip. I became a spey snob. I can't wait to make a steelhead trip and swing flies for hours upon hours for scant few 

takes. I really can't.

Rick with a big hen chinook that took an egg.

It took much too long for me to experience the Pulaski salmon run. It's such a huge part of Northeast fishing culture that one can't can't live here, be serious about fishing, and get away without making the trip at least once. There wasn't anyone I'd rather have taken the trip with than Rick. Though Charlie and I had never been, Rick has a long history with this fishery. He knows it well, he's seen it morph and change a bit over the years, and he's caught a lot of salmon and steelhead there. Charlie was also great company. I'm sure the three of us will fish the Salmon River again sometime, Covid willing.

Until next time,

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, C, and Franky for supporting this blog on Patreon.

Iced Guides, Leaky Waders, and Steelhead

Sorry for the atypically long gap between posts folks, but this one is the reason why and I think it was worth it. 

I've been watching friends post big trout and salmon from Lake Ontario tributaries for years, and though it's not that far really, I just never got the opportunity to go. Then my good friend Rick, who lived in western New York for a long time and fished the Salmon River and other tribs often but hadn't made the run from CT in four years, had a hankering to go back and invited me to join him.

 I'd finally get my shot... winter steelhead. Cold water, cold air, slow days with precious few chances at big, beautiful, powerful fish on light tackle. This is a fishery where dreams come true just as easily as the crushing sense of the difficulty of it all sets in. You could cast all day long in the freezing cold and not touch a single fish. But if you're a fly fisherman in the Northeast or mid Atlantic, you've heard all that before many times, and I don't want to continue with such redundancy. 

This was a whirlwind one night trip, Fishing from 10 :00 something on Thursday until dark then dawn till 2:00 on Friday. But Rick knows what he's doing and I of course did tons of research and felt well equipped enough. Though nymphing doesn't really speak to me for these big truly regal animals like spey casting and swinging big flies does, I also didn't want to go home without catching one. Swinging big flies is a high risk high reward tactic, if I had done it the entire time and come up with even one small steelhead it would be one of the most exciting achievements in my fishing carrier. But I am still very much a novice at those tactics. My spey cast is getting better but I'm still not happy with my swing depth and speed control at all, and even less so on water I've never fished. So I was pretty well prepared to just tight-line and indicator nymph on this trip and get the lay of the land. I told myself if I caught one on the first day I'd spend the second swinging intruders. But that was a lie. I'm not that strong willed. 

We started out at a super secret spot that nobody fishes (wink), the Altmar Bridge. The air temperature was in the mid teens and the water was in the mid 30's. It took me a very little time to figure out two things:

1: If I was going to stick with tightlining I was going to have to deal with ice buildup on the leader that I had to remove regularly to keep it from dragging my fly.

2: I had a leak in the left foot of my waders.

2b: I was going to have a very old foot for the rest of the trip. 

The trickle of frigid water found it's way through my wool sock and polypropylene base layer not 20 minutes after I'd started fishing and I swore to myself. These weren't old waders, on the contrary... they were two months new. Yeah I run any gear I buy through the ringer, fishing vastly more and harder than even a lot of very dedicated fisherman, but really? Two months? That was a very annoying way to start a winter fishing trip, but I would put up with it. I don't let that sort of thing ruin my fishing. Things improved when I looked upstream and saw Rick's rod bent double. I quit what I was doing and walked up to ready the net and my camera. 

The fish was pretty well behaved, and I eventually sunk the net around the first steelhead I'd ever seen up close in person. And, actually, as many steelhead as Rick has caught this was his first on the fly rod. It took a BHHESH I'd tied. And it was under an indicator, so after we quickly photographed and released the fish I stuck an indicator on myself, sick of having to remove the ice from my leader. I had to clear the guides regularly anyway, I decided I may as well decrease my work load. I hadn't had the indicator on for 20 minutes when it plunged under. I swung and set my rubber tailed BHHESH in the mouth of a large, grumpy something. Line dumped from my reel as the fish made its initial run. It, though larger than Rick's, was also pretty well behaved. After some give and take, some rolling on the surface, and a lot of head shaking, my first steelhead ever, a 30 something inch dark buck, was in the net. 

As much as I'd have preferred to have caught that fish swinging a sexy black and blue tube fly, the method I'd deceived it with wasn't without its intrigue. I'd caught that big animal under a small indicator with a size 12 nymph and no added weight. That elephant ate a peanut, and I won't lie, that's really cool. 

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful for us in terms of hooking fish. We had lunch at the Altmar Hotel, then I ran into Salmon River Outfitters to get something to patch my waders with. "I'll just give you some tape", one of the guys said. I left with a length of duct tape and I bought a couple flies, not wanting to leave without paying for something. We fished some new water and, at dusk, were back at the bridge, where big fish were rolling but not eating. Warming up in our room at Whitaker's in Pulaski, I figured out where my leak was. In the morning, after it dried, I'd try to patch it. 

The next morning we were up before the sun and on the water before it too. My patch job proved not useless but not completely successful either, I still had cold river water where it ought not be. I wanted to stick it out at the bridge, which had turned on quite well the day prior, but time ticked away and though people were piking the odd fish here and there, my feet were getting cold and I just didn't feel "the feeling" there. Rick hooked and lost a big fish before I headed off to find some relative solitude and a place that felt right to me. I found that place, and asked the spey caster that was wading upstream along the edge of the run if he was going to make another pass. "Yeah, I just ran it with pink and white, now I'm going to give it a pass with black and purple". I left it to him and fished the head of the next pool, anxiously waiting for him to get to the bottom. As soon as he did I made my way back up and got myself into a good position to start plying the cold waters. It didn't take me all that long to hook a fish, but it was a tiny little thing of maybe 16 and a half inches. It was beautiful and chrome and incredibly spastic, but not what I'd hoped for out of that spot. 

 I ground away at that spot for half an hour more and changed from the bead head Red Dart I'd been using to am unweighted peacock body stonefly nymph and a pair of shot. I started counting casts to keep focused. On cast 38, the indicator hesitated like it had many times before. But this time, when I set the hook, instead of it being a rock or a stick or a lump of rotting salmon, I set the hook into a steelhead that was absolutely furious that I'd just interrupted his day. There was no time for me or the fish to figure out what was happening, it immediately hauled ass towards the other bank. He thankfully stopped when he got there rather than diving into any root masses, instead slowly coming back my way. He went back to exactly where he'd been when I hooked him and then decided not to budge at all. I strained my six pound tippet and eventually slowly started pulling him to me. He got close, and with not enough distance between me to have a lot of pressure on him, we were in a brief stalemate again. I took a few steps back and the sound set him off. He we charging down and across the pool, tail walking and sort of half-jumping, a sight to behold. He was at the top of the riffle now, and I started to get him into the shallows now and then. I didn't have the net or anyone around to help though, and that was a big disadvantage. On of those times that I got the fish, which really wasn't that big, into the shallows, he started death rolling and wrapped himself in the leader before making it back into water deep enough I could use. I chased him down the riffle, falling and bashing my thigh on a rock once, down into the next pool. There was a slack spot there separated from the river itself by a shallow bar, I knew I would beat him there and I did. When I got my hands on the fish and saw that state of the tangle around in I couldn't believe my luck. My tippet was wrapped four times around this steelhead's left pectoral, with a completely slack length of line between int and the fly which was just barely in the skin of his teeth. Had that fly popped out and the tippet unwrapped, as it did while I walked the fish up into shallow water to photograph him, this would have been a very different story. Luckily he didn't struggle enough to get away from me then, though I was taken aback by how much energy he still had in him after that battle.

And folks, I'll leave you that that. That fish, though it was smaller than my first, was the fish of the trip for me. Thanks so much Rick for inviting me along. It was a blast. 

Until next time.

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, and Leo for supporting this blog on Patreon.