On Washington's Olympic Peninsula, mid-November means more than just getting ready for a big turkey dinner at Mom's ...  it means that the long wait for the arrival of the winter steelhead fishing season is over. Beginning around the second week November, the first of the hatchery-origin steelhead return to the Forks, Washington area rivers.

The hatchery steelhead run peaks around mid-December and tapers off in early to mid-January. It is at this time that the first of the beloved native, or wild steelhead begin to show in good numbers in the region's rivers.

Limits of Olympic Peninsula hatchery steelhead.

Most anglers choose to harvest their daily limit of hatchery steelhead with a current limit of three fish daily.

Every year, there are a few lucky anglers that catch steelhead in excess of thirty pounds! In fact, steelhead as large as 38 pounds have been taken in the tribal nets! The largest sport-caught fish we've seen was a released buck of over 45 inches in length that weighed approximately 34.5 pounds.

Although not required by law in all stretches of the Peninsula rivers, we are proud to say that we operate under a strict catch-and-release policy on wild steelhead stocks.

Young anglers learning the importance of protecting our wild steelhead!

And if you do catch a trophy ... we ALWAYS keep a nice camera and tape measure on board for pictures and measurements for a reproduction mount ... the reproductions are less expensive and last longer than most skin mounts anyhow; and as catch-and-release has become more popular, the quality of available reproductions has risen to that of even the finest skin-mounts!

Late season steelhead anglers plying the waters of the Sol Duc River sometimes encounter high-speed silver submarines known as spring chinook. Arguably the hardest fighting of all Pacific salmon and certainly one of the best-eating, we affectionately refer to these hatchery-origin fish as 'salmo barbequeus'.

April bonus! A spring chinook sweeten a day of wild steelhead fishing.