Steelhead fishing from another era

It was April 1, 1968, and my second year of guiding fly fishermen to brown trout, salmon and steelhead fishermen. My twin brother, George, and I was scouting the Little Manistee River between 6 Mile and 9 Mile bridges, for clients who would arrive to fish the next twp days.

The river was rain-swollen and murky, and in another hour of heavy rain, it would be a foot higher and the color of chocolate milk. I thought a big buck steelie was on a shallow gravel bar an easy cast from shore, and George shinnied up a shoreline tree and stood on a big branch to check things out.

"That fish is huge," George muttered to me. "It's bigger than any steelhead I've ever seen, and his cheeks and gill covers are a bright orangish-red color. This is an awesome fish.

"You know about where he is. Cast a copper spinner upstream and reel hard when I tell you."

The author admires a Betsie River steelhead.

I cast, and George said to cast another six feet farther upstream in hopes of getting the spinner down in the heavy current. My next cast, he said, was on target.

"That's the spot," he said. "Keep casting to it. Reel hard now!"

I reeled, and nothing happened. Cast after cast went into the right spot, and I'd reel fast enough to make the spinner blade turn over in the current, and after 40 or 50 casts, George yelled "Hit him!"

The hooks were slammed home as I felt the strike, and nothing happened, so I pounded the rod tip back to set the hooks again. The huge steelhead rolled to the surface, his cheeks and gill covers glowing like evening campfire embers, and the fish started swimming upstream, his dorsal fin creasing the surface like a shark. He didn't move fast but seem possessed with tremendous power.

I moved along the bank but stayed downstream from the fish. The trick was to make the giant steelhead fight the rod pressure and the river current. We duked it out in the soggy rain for 10 minutes before the fish swapped ends and headed downstream into a deep hole. I was reeling while running but still the fish tangled the line in underwater brush and quickly broke me off.

"How big," I asked George. He'd caught steelhead to almost 20 pounds, and he guessed this ponderous male was at least 25 pound, perhaps more.

Big steelhead were more common back then and there were fewer anglers.

Wow, you say. That's what I said, and of the thousands of steelhead I've caught before and since, it remains the largest one I've hooked or seen.

My point with this anecdote is that incident occurred back in the days of very few steelhead fishermen and lots of big fish. The Little Manistee River at that time had a huge run of spawning steelhead that averaged, according to the DNR, between 11 and 12 pounds. A 15-pounder wasn't anything special, and it took a 17- or 18-pounder to raise any eyebrows.

That same year, also on the Little Manistee River, I found a 30-yard stretch of gravel that was wall-to-wall fish. The river bottom was honeycombed with spawning redds, and 15 or 20 feet away would be another redd, and every one held a female and one to four males. We fished only for the male fish because a hooked hen would take all the boys with her.

On that day I set a record of sorts. I hooked 30 steelhead in eight hours, and am proud to announce that I made a professional release on every fish. If you're unfamiliar with the term, a professional release means I lost every fish, one way or another.

There were far more steelhead in those days than now. There are far more fishermen today than back then. It's easy to do the basic math; fewer fish are being caught by more fishermen.

Brother George casts a fly to a steelhead.

There are still some rather exciting days if anglers can find a spot where fishing pressure is minimal. Two years ago me and another man hooked 30 steelhead in a morning. We landed about half of them, and released each and every one. Those days seldom occur these days.

Low Lake Michigan water levels in the past haven't helped. The Betsie River mouth has been so low in recent years that very few fish made it upstream. Rivers like the Manistee below Tippy Dam can be good at times, but the fishing pressure is just too heavy to suit me. I can take two or three hours of fishing in a crowd, and then get turned off by the whole thing.

That doesn't mean that you should, but it's easy for me to remember way back when to those special days where a steelhead fisherman would consider himself unlucky to see two other anglers all day. And, back in the day, people didn't crowd you or wade down through a spawning bed.

They had some class and good manners. The fish were larger and more plentiful back then, and the rivers weren't swarming with anglers. It was a different era, and the steelhead fishing now remains fairly good, but remembering what it was like 40-45 years ago is enough to make a grown man cry.

Personally, it's my thought that we'll probably never see the likes of those days again but remembering them is still a thrill for an old goat like me.

Posted via email from Dave Richey Outdoors