![]() I think the one thing we can all agree on is that steelhead are in trouble. “You’ve never caught a real steelhead!” That’s stupid. To my mind, that’s ten-thousand guys who would support steelhead conservation. No fun, I get it, but those are ten-thousand guys who are so fired up about steelhead that they will endure those conditions. Look around any Great Lakes Steelhead river and what do you see? Ten-thousand guys fishing shoulder to shoulder. Some guy from the east starts to talk about steelhead in the Midwest and it’s an instant fight, with the west coast angler saying something like, “You’ve never caught a real steelhead!” All this accomplishes is alienation. ![]() That’s a good thing, I’m not advocating for fishing pressure but here’s what happens. What’s missing? The crowd! Western anglers think they have a lot of guys on the river but they have no idea what a crowd is. Look around yourself on any western steelhead river. One of my west coast buddies will start railing about lake-run rainbows and the knuckle- draggers who fish for them and I’ll tell them that their attitude is killing steelhead. ![]() I’ve had this argument over more beers than I can count, and I’m sure I’ll have it again. That said, west coast anglers can be real assholes about it. (of fish) migrating from salt water to spawn in fresh water, as salmon of the genera Salmo and Oncorhynchus (distinguished from catadromous ). head.Ī silvery rainbow trout that migrates to the sea before returning to fresh water to spawn.It’s not my job to make definitions so don’t blame me. No fish which lives its entire life in fresh water is a steelhead. That means it runs from saltwater to fresh. Here’s why both sides are wrong.įirst, let me be blunt about this, a steelhead is by definition an anadromous fish. Eastern anglers refer to fish running from the Great Lakes as steelhead and western anglers insist that only fish running from the saltwater are steelhead. ![]() There are historically two sides of this argument, although lately there seems to be a third, I’ll get to that later. Are beads flies? Are hatchery steelhead killing wild steelhead? Is nymphing wrong? But the most contentious and, frankly, mind bending disagreement is over what a steelhead actually is. It seems you can’t say the word “steelhead” without starting an argument. I’ll probably be sorry I started this, but I have a point to make. By Louis Cahill Is all the arguing over steelhead hurting the fish? ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |