Catching Late Season Steelhead
Published: Monday, November 14, 2022 12:00 pm
By: Dan Armitage
A version of this article appeared in the Buyer's Guide 2023 of Great Lakes Scuttlebutt magazine.
Steelhead are rainbow trout on steroids, fish that start their lives in rivers yet grow-up in oceans and lakes downstream, where the trout head the first chance the fingerlings get. Once in the big water, the trout feed on the abundant baitfish found there, growing much larger and stronger than their inland, stream-bound kin. After a couple of years building weight and stamina in the lake or ocean, the super-charged trout return to their home streams to engage in the spawning ritual.
Depending on the strain of steelhead, this migration takes place in the spring or the fall. Most steelhead runs in large inland waters such as the Great Lakes take place in the autumn, but again, it’s dependent on the steelhead strain that was stocked. And I say “stocked” because steelhead originally were a coastal species only, running from freshwater streams down to the saltwater sea and back again to spawn. When biologists learned that the trout would also migrate from freshwater streams to freshwater lakes and back, there were efforts from coast to coast to get the sought-after gamefish species placed in inland lakes where the water was cool enough to support the salmonids.
Natural spawning is not as successful in the all-freshwater fish of the Great Lakes, so steelhead eggs are collected and fertilized and the trout are reared in hatcheries and released in streams to supplement the stocks of steelhead that are able to reproduce in the wild. In most inland cases, the vast majority of steelhead found in any population are hatchery fish. This does not diminish their popularity with anglers – at least in our inland ‘seas’– where the lake-run rainbows thriving in lakes and reservoirs are famous for their hard fighting and highly sought after by boating and wading anglers alike.
By now most – but not all – of the steelhead are in the Great Lakes tributaries, a move that takes place each autumn, when the annual migration starts with the steelhead staging and concentrating off the mouths and lower reaches of their home streams and rivers. They do so in anticipation of the spawn, which the trout engage in despite the relative lack of success is sustaining the population. Many Great Lakes anglers catch steelhead in the harbors through the winter, as long as there is open water, slow trolling the mouths and venturing up the larger tributaries to the first barrier and prevents their boats form proceeding father upstream.
The staging and roaming puts the fish in range of small craft that might not be capable of venturing far offshore to catch the steelhead that roam the open water. The ready-to-migrate rainbows stack up in protected harbors and cruise the lower reaches of their rivers awaiting the arrival of colder water to trigger their runs upstream. During this time, boaters trolling spoons and crankbaits that resemble the primary baitfish the steelhead feed on in the area can experience some amazing action. “Fresh” fish straight from the open water, called chromers for their bright steel coloration, are famous for busting tackle and amazing anglers with their fights when hooked, often jumping clear of the water several times to try to shake free.
Anglers catch the staging steelhead by a variety of methods. Those of us with boats have an advantage in that we can cast or troll spoons, spinner or crankbaits, or cast natural offerings, in waters off the river mouths, in the protected harbor areas, and up the boatable lower stretches of the tributaries. The easiest way to locate and catch the super-charged trout is to troll crankbaits that imitate the shape and size of the predominant baitfish. While you can try to mimic the local baitfish color too, that sort of goes out the window, as some of the most productive color patterns, such as fire tiger, are quite garish and nothing close to the natural hue of say, an emerald shiner or shad.
Whatever color crankbait you use, troll one deep-diver and one shallow-diver from 100 to 150 feet or so behind the boat at two or three miles per hour, and cruise the waters off the river mouth, up to the first obstacle or in the harbor area. If the steelhead are around, you’ll won’t have long to wait.
