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Winter Fly fishing for Steelhead

By Jack Kintner

Winter steelheading usually means cold. Cold water, cold weather and cold rain, and often cold fishing. If this gives you cold feet an exception can be found east of the mountains in a lovely and clean little river known as the Methow.

And just so you know, if you didn’t already, this is another Washington state place name of native origin that is not pronounced the way it looks. Think of the two words within the name, “met” and “how,” and you’ve got it. There’s no “th” sound.

The river rises in the Cascades on the east side of remote Methow Pass, not far from the North Cascades Highway (Washington State Highway 20), and flows southwest to join the Columbia at Pateros. The highway joins it at Early Winters and follows it to Twisp before turning east again.

The steelhead we’re after come from a hatchery in Winthrop, making the 30 miles or so of river between there and Pateros prime summer run steelhead country. With the presence of a remnant but nearly extinct native run, fishers are encouraged to keep the fish they catch if they’re bearing the mark of a hatchery fish, a missing adipose fin.

By the time the steelhead have left the sea and returned to the pools and riffles of the Methow they’ve traveled many hundred of miles up the Columbia River. They have also traversed seven dams that, with a few exceptions like Hanford Reach, have almost made the Columbia into a series of lakes. The dams are not nearly the obstacle on the upriver return trip that they are for the young fish going downstream, where their needs compete with those of farmers irrigating crops and power companies selling electricity, both of whom want lots of water – and young fish – piling up behind the dams and going through the turbines.

This year has been a good one for steelheading on the Methow because there’s more water than in previous years. The temperature will often mean using a sinking tip line at least to get an attractor pattern, perhaps with some kind of imitation egg, down to where the fish are.

“They’re getting fish now,” said my local fly shop wizard, Justin Jackson at Bellingham’s H & H Anglers & Outfitters, “but the water’s colder in the winter from November on so sinking tips for sure and then swing weighted flies. They’ll be sluggish and less apt to jump at a fly, but they are there.”

My partner Dave and I put in our raft, the good ship Lollipop, just below Twisp at an informal launch at Halterman Hole after leaving a car about eight miles downriver at the boat launch near Carlton. As I readied the gear and pushed the raft into water deep enough to float both of us, he got a strike in a pool next to where we were standing.
A mile or so downstream, when the sun was just barely up enough to begin warming our hats, Dave landed and released a nice hen. Later on I landed and kept an eight pound hatchery bred fish after waiting for what seemed like an eternity for it to take the articulated leech pattern wet fly I’d thrown at it.

Dave was using an orange prawn pattern with a greased line on a 9-foot Sage Xi steelhead rod, and I had my trusty five weight (the name rubbed off years ago). Despite the name Steelhead have a reputation for striking very softly, and the summer runs in the Methow are no exception. In November and on through the winter they’ll be out there to catch, but it calls for the most delicate of touches to know when to just gently raise the rod to set the hook. This is as different from smack-down hoot ‘n holler bass fishing as a poetry reading is from an afternoon at a NASCAR race, both of which are fine pursuits, just different. But something in the gentle pastels of this piece of prime ranch country in central Washington made a quiet trip seem more fitting.

Once a fish is hooked, of course, you pop out of your somnolent reverie to begin playing one of these aggressive, sexually motivated, anadromous (sea-going) rainbow trout that run four to eight pounds or more. All the fish we hooked jumped and cartwheeled, threatening to turn our placid stand on a gravel bar or quiet drift down the lonely mid-week river into a pell-mell chase reminiscent of Brad Pitt in A River Runs Through It.

We found that these fish like to sit at the tail of the many pools the river courses through, and it took a while to catch on to that. As often happens with flyfishing for Steelhead there were some longish breaks, as well as large redds guarded by a few large salmon with some fight left. They’d sometimes zoom this way and that at the passing of our raft and then stop, almost panting like an old boxer.

When Methow fishing is hot, it’s not to be believed. The trick is finding the fish. For guides, try Steve Worley in Ellensburg at www.worleybuggerflyco.com, or North Cascades Fly Fishing, located at Sun Mountain Lodge, at 1-888/572-0493. Both offer side trips to productive Moccasin Lake as well.

There are many websites that furnish information on places to stay. For fishing information try the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife, or the Northwest Source at www.nwsource.com.