Rossiman,

When you nymph fish the CW, are you "bobber-dogging" or some such? My experience on the CW is limited, but from what I've seen most holding water is in very broad pools, the kind of water that was made for swinging. It seems like it would take a week to nymph fish one piece of water, if I'm understanding the method being the conventional dead drift. Plus, how long of a cast can be effectively nymph fished? It seems like it would be nearly impossible to get a very long dead drift on say, an 80' cast. And some anglers consider an 80' cast cast on the CW a short one.

Coley,

It ain't no novel, so don't apologize! It's an interesting variation to me. The notion of nymph fishing for steelhead was first discussed with a friend in the mid-80s. He had caught two steelhead that way, one in the Carbon and another on the Hoko. Intrigued, I gave it a try on water that wasn't restricted to fly only, since the regs didn't permit any lead on flies or leaders then. I must have fished that method for almost an hour and a half before reverted to the far more comfortable wet fly swing. I've tried it a couple times since, and a couple times for trout, and am now probably up to a good four hours total invested in nymph and bobber fishing (with zero fish caught, I might add). Oh, except for the day spent bead fishing for mainly char in AK one summer.

If salmon egg hatch matching doesn't account for steelhead bead selectivity, do you have any hypotheses that would? All my experiences with steelhead selectivity have been the product of fishing pressure. I subscribe to the theory that an undisturbed steelhead will hit the first properly presented bait or lure it sees because that has served well for decades. Disturbed steelhead often won't hit anything at all, and when they do hit, it's usually something different and random. Under what kind of conditions have you observed steelhead selectivity?

That's quite a selection of flavors you have there in your boxes! That begs the following question. If steelhead can be so selective, what is your fishing strategy?

If that isn't obvious, let me explain my premise. Although it varies from river to river, let me offer the Skagit or Sauk as an example. I figure about 90% of the river or more is not steelhead holding water, so I don't fish it. Then there's maybe 10% that is suitable holding water, but at any given time only 10% of that 10% (i.e., 1%) actually holds steelhead, and that's only if there is a good run and we're at or near the peak of the season. As a practical matter and being a traditional wet fly swinger, I'll try to cover as much suitable holding water as I can in a day, since even most of the good holding water isn't occupied by a fish when I'm fishing it. So I'll try to fish 5 to 8 good pieces of holding water in the course of a day's fishing. I fish each piece once, never repeating a cast unless I blow one or draw a rise or a strike. I generally only change flies when I snag and break off, and would never fish through a pool twice unless I had knowledge certain that there was a fish there that didn't hit on the first pass through the pool.

What you described regarding bead fishing is, I think, physically impossible in one day's fishing. It could take all of 8 hours or more to fish one pool on the Skagit thoroughly, experimenting with different sizes and colors of beads. However, I don't think the experimenting would be necessary, since any fish present would likely hit the first offering presented, but that scene doesn't fit your selectivity schema.

It appears that a bead fishing strategy would best fit two scenes: 1) very small streams, and 2) water that you have knowledge certain that is stacked with steelhead, like a hatchery blood hole. Otherwise, in order to fish 3 bead sizes in 4 different color patterns, you would run out of daylight fishing the first pool on a 6 mile float down the Sauk River, for instance, and assuming you began at daylight. See what I mean?

You said, "With this method, it's all about the second or two the bead is in front of the fish and how good your bead and drift are, not necessarily about covering lots of water." That pretty much restricts a person in WA to the places steelhead stack up, like the hatchery blood holes, and precious few places for wild fish. And those are the places that get hammered hard, day in and day out, and then the fish fit my above philosophy about not hitting the first properly presented bait or lure, or maybe anything at all sometimes.

I don't anticipate getting into the bead scene in a big way. I have some beads that I took to AK 3 and 4 years ago (probably all fit into a couple compartments in one of your big boxes or rejects). Still haven't tried them here. The closest I've come is a couple small streams I sometimes fish that have only a few spots that swing well. In order to get a day's fishing out of it, I created a bastardized setup, where I just remove my sink tip and add an 8 or 10' 8# leader and a split shot a foot above my fly, no bobber. It gets down in narrow slots and then fishes what I imagine is kind of a Liesenring lift, an old nymph fishing method if you never heard of it, instead of a swing. It's limited to shorter casts, less than 50'. It seems to work, and is easy to switch back to conventional wet fly swing for the next spot suited to it.

OP,

See what you've started? Todd the mod is gonna' want a separate forum created for bastard child fishing methods. But a great conversation starter!

Twitch - oh no! Not you too! Yeah, I see beads suck even in Orygun. Actually, what I hear is that the N. coast rivers don't have much water well suited to the traditional wet fly swing, but lots of bedrock formed slots and so forth.

Sg