Kevin sends the following:
The last many years I’ve been so into fly fishing that I really don’t get excited about catching fish on spinning or casting gear, with one exception: early king salmon. If you haven’t experienced this bite, it is as exciting and hard hitting as fishing gets in the Midwest. Start out with a super-slam hit and follow it up with a couple minutes of crazy trouble. In this warm water the salmon will do cart-wheeling jumps followed by a couple hundred foot, non-stop rip, likely into a log jam. Or possibly they’ll end the fight with a quick knock-out by hitting, running and wrapping the anchor rope before everyone realized there was even a fish hooked.
These fish are so much fun that I’ll take them anyway I can get them. But if you just have the fly fishing bug so bad that you can’t stand the feel of a spinning rod in you hand, your in luck because they’ll hit big bright streamers as well, just not as well as lures.
The streamer below is one of Walt Grau’s old favorites for trout that he calls the Flash Forward. Walt used this pattern successfully while guiding for kings in Alaska this summer and was excited to give it a try back home.
We’ve got king salmon in the Pere Marquette in good numbers. We went 4 for 12 last Wednesday on Thundersticks. These fish are hard to land. But it’s a lot of fun to try.
