Scandi Lines for Winter Steelhead?

When winter finally rolls around, there is always a big purge of gear in my pack. Out with the summer steelhead gear, in with the winter ge...

When winter finally rolls around, there is always a big purge of gear in my pack. Out with the summer steelhead gear, in with the winter gear. Scandi lines, tapered leaders, floating tips, dry flies, floatant, they all end up in a drawer waiting for their time to shine in the summer, while big tips, marabou flies and split shot all find their place in my pack for the winter.

And every year I regret making that purge. I love the changing season, and I love chasing winter steelhead. There is something symbolic in that purge that represents the finality of the changing seasons, but the symbolism of the act has little to do with the effectiveness of the decision in how it impacts my day of fishing.

By that, I mean Scandi lines and small flies absolutely have their place in winter steelheading. Let the angry emails pour in, but I keep finding myself in situations during the winter season where I should have been using a lighter setup than I had brought with me, including this last weekend. It isn't the first time, but hopefully putting my thoughts in print will be the last reminder I need before finally putting a few items back in the pack.

Rainy, cold and wet, we must be winter steelheading!

We haven't had much of any rain in December before this last weekend. It is sad and a little concerning, but it has made for low and clear rivers across the region, and we are not a fan of low and clear rivers around here.... The good news is that there are steelhead around, but they are hard to find and even harder to catch in these conditions. They are especially hard to catch when using Skagit lines and big flies, which is standard fare for winter steelheading.

We had seen chrome winter steelhead in the tailout of just about every pool. They were way in the back of those tailouts, sitting just in front of the riffle leading into the next run, often in a foot of water or less. They also saw us from the moment we approached. Most of them bolted before we saw them, shooting upstream past the boat as we floated through run after run. The others either backed down or slid into some deeper water nearby. We saw only one fish we saw all day that didn't move immediately.

We finally got a shot to actually cast at a fish that didn't spook out when we pulled the boat in. But it spooked when that chunk of T-10 with the attached Skagit head hit the water. There is no way to be gentle when throwing that kind of setup. And even though it is winter time, any steelhead sitting in a glassy 1 foot deep crystal clear piece of water is going to be spooky. I thought that it would have been the perfect time to try skating a dry fly over these fish. I am 91% sure that we could have had a take if we had been able to get far enough with our plan that a fish actually saw the fly skating in front of it's face without spooking beforehand.

There was a nice bright fish way back in there. We had seen it, but lost track of it. After thirty minutes of casting towards it, we gave up up, but watched it bolt out from the the head of the head of the riffle when we floated over it. Keep fishing all the way through the head of the riffle!!!

Time after time, we got to a nice pool, carefully set up and then watched a fish scatter when our casts started flying. It had only been an hour into the morning when we started rifling through our gear looking for a Scandi head that missed the purge, or even a long floating tip. That would have been nice. Instead, we were forced to fish with our Skagit heads and intermediate RIO iMOW tips. Those sink slow enough, but they are also not gentle when they land.

So our day really turned into an observational float. Q) How many steelhead can we spook? A) Far more than we were expecting to see. Q) Where are they sitting? A) Almost exclusively in tailouts in shallow, glassy water. Q) Can we identify runs to come back and fish when we have either better conditions, or more appropriate gear for the conditions? A) Absolutely!

I knew that I should always have that Scandi head tucked away in my bag, along with some smaller hairwing flies, but I am finally going to do something about it. Winter steelhead are just steelhead, and steelhead will move to eat a fly. Winter steelhead won't move as far as summer steelhead (or maybe I should say that steelhead in the winter won't move as far as they will in the summer), but these fish only had to move a few inches to take a good surface presentation if we had been able to make one. Now next week, I will be a little more prepared for low and clear water, even though our weather pattern should bring all the rivers back into typical winter shape!