Some skippers, some footballs, some big males, a lake run brown, it’s been a veritable smorgasbord of good fishing on the Pere Marquette for the last four days.
While air temps have rarely been topping 34, overnight lows are only in the 20s and water temps yesterday in the lower river were pushing 36 degrees. The river is finally returning to normal levels for late February, but there is still some stain to the water and fresh fish are moving up. We’ve been getting some snow over the last several days and snow pack in the woods, particularly in north facing areas, is still quite good, so despite the heavy runoff over the past two weeks or so we’re still expecting healthy spring runoff to come as things warm up.
We’ve been fishing the lower river a good bit, but also hit the middle river some. Swinging streamers on the two handed rods has been producing steelhead. Patterns that have worked over the past four days have run the gamut from pink and black, black with an orange ice dub head, all black, all white, and black and blue with purple flash with a big orange bead off the back. Seems that you just have to find an active fish willing to move a bit to grab the streamer. Indicator fishing with orange and white nuke eggs and hot orange 10mm beads has really started to outperform streamer fishing, particularly over the past two days.
This is the best steelhead bite we’ve had since December and with temperatures pushing 40 by the end of the week we’re expecting things to continue at this pace. Thank the lord, Spring is a comin’!
