Missoulian: Written by ROB CHANEY
Photographed by TOM BAUER of the Missoulian
Posted: Thursday, March 4, 2010 7:00 am
SALMON, Idaho - In shark movies, the excitement starts when the fin breaks the water.
With steelhead trout, it's when a tail as big as a man's hand swirls out of a coffee-brown river. Every fish on a line weighs a ton when you're reeling, but seeing that fin fly reminds you this is the big-game version of angling.
Throw out most of what you know about fishing when you go after steelhead. There are no bug hatches to wait or match. Don't look for root wads and shady holes. In fact, skip everything involving food - steelhead don't eat.
At least not during their spring and fall migration runs into Idaho's Salmon and Clearwater river drainages. Like salmon, steelhead are born in mountain streams, grow up in the Pacific Ocean, and return home to breed. On that return trip, the big fish live off their fat supplies.
So catching steelhead essentially involves picking a fight with one. In a productive technique known as "hotshotting," the angler drops a shiny, 4-inch plug in the current and lets it wobble. The plug fights the water so much, it feels like a mid-sized brown trout when you retrieve it.
"There are 100 ways of catching steelhead, and this is probably the simplest," said Aggipah River Trips owner Bill Bernt. "We don't cast. Just let the current carry the line out. The fish are likely to hook themselves."
***
A hundred million years ago an intrusion of granite produced a range of mountains that covers most of central Idaho. The Salmon River has carved a gorge deeper than the Grand Canyon through these mountains. Their jagged peaks, carved by ancient glaciers, tower above evergreen forests that shelter deer, elk, bear and mountain lion. Mountain goats and bighorn sheep scramble among the crags above the river. The Shoshoni Indians called this river Aggipah ("big fish water") for the Pacific Salmon which migrate 800 miles to spawn at its’ headwaters.
