Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Steelhead Exploration and Epic Trout Fishing

The trout fishing available in the Skeena's many rivers, streams, creeks and even road side ditches and sloughs are often overshadowed by their larger migratory cousins, Steelhead and Salmon.  In reality, if these same trout fishing opporunities existed closer to a metropolitan area, they would certainly be much more popular.

On a recent weekend, Dustin, Sky and myself had planned a scouting trip for Steelhead on a few remote coastal rivers to see if the fish were in early.  Though the rivers were too low to hold Steelhead in any numbers, we did find two sloughs which provided for some of our most memorable trout fishing to date...

Fishing the dark water - a prime lie for Spring Steelhead in coastal rivers.


A favourite coastal river with characteristically strong, thick Steelhead, but too little water on this day.


The eulachon (pronounced "oo-li-kun") run in full swing concentrates eagles, sea gulls, and other sea birds by the river's edge each year as they gorge on millions of eulachon migrating upstream.  Also called candle fish, these small, silvery fish are high in oil content, and have been prized by natives in northwestern BC for hundreds of years.


An old tree stump comprises the foreground of this interesting landscape.

Nicholas Dean guide Sky Richard searching for trout on top of a beaver house in a large, deep river.

One of many nice cutthroat trout landed in one of two small back channel sloughs.

Coastal Cutthroat trout are beautiful fish who fight surprisingly well on light fly rods.

Even Cayleigh likes trout fishing!

1 comment:

Matadors Blog said...

cool! wish I was there!