Southern Wisconsin Steelhead

With spring starting to finally warm up in the midwest the steelhead have started to begin their spawning ritual.  Males will become darker and show off more of the red band and rosy cheecks and aggressively battle over the females laid up on their redds unloading eggs.  More often than not some less distracted and more aggressive fish will hold below these spawning fish sucking up eggs like a hoover.  In conditions where the water clarity is good you can witness this as fish zig zag back and forth racing to get the next egg floating by.  Anyway, as the spawning process distracts and exhausts the fish they become more lame than game, and I usually would try to wrap up my spring steelhead fishing by mid April, but since we’ve just started to see the rivers flowing at a fishable level these last couple weeks there are still plenty of fresh fish willing to eat.  Not only will they eat, they will move for a swinging fly!  I went two for three swinging a “decay spey”  flesh fly that I tied last fall.  Though there is no flesh floating through the river this time of year the color combination still triggers a strike from an angry steelhead.  Of course there are still more fish willing to eat a dead drifted egg, but I did get some fresh, bright chrome swinging!