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."
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Idaho steelhead fishing on the Salmon River occurs primarily from mid- fall through early spring. Steelhead enter the mouth of the Salmon from the Snake River in fishable numbers in late September-early October. As the fall progresses, the migration extends farther upstream, reaching the Salmon area usually in mid October in reasonable numbers. Later in the fall, declining river temperatures stall upstream movement, usually in mid-November. In the upper part of the Salmon River, slush ice flows most days through the winter, restricting fishing. In late February/early March, the river begins to warm, ice ceases to be a problem, and fishing resumes in the Salmon area. By early April, most of the steelhead have moved on upstream from the Salmon area.
Trout fishing on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River is primarily a summer activity. The season (even though catch-and-release) does not open until Memorial Day. In normal years the river is too high to effectively fish at that time, and remains high until late June. The Middle Fork is dam-free, so flow is a function of snow-melt. Fishing is better at river levels below about four feet on the guage, which in a normal water year means late June-early July on through the summer. In low water years, the river can be low enough to fish throughout June, and fishing is good then.
Idaho has some of the best-known trout streams in country--and also some of the best - but least-known trout hideouts. Most Idaho fly fishing trips offer a few hours of fishing, but on the 
