Third Coast Fly

You may remember our friend Hollis Bennett from when he visited Beaver Island in July. Hollis is a top notch photographer and this visit he wanted to see winter steelhead in his viewfinder.

I hit the water for two days with Hollis, the first day with our very own Steve Martinez and the second with the King of Steelhead Swing, Walt Grau. We lucked out with both days being, not too cold, grey skies and several eager steelhead.

Hollis had a new underwater housing that he put to good use. For a guy from Nashville, Hollis showed some toughness keeping his hands submerged for minutes to get some of these great shots.

Doug and Jeremy from In-Fisherman headed over to catch steelhead on some of my big flashy jigs. A high pressure system had us locked into blue skies with not even a hint of clouds, great weather for fisherman but not the recipe for hot steelheading.

We pounded the water for the first day and a half with a couple nice steelhead in the net. Then for no explainable reason, in the middle of the afternoon, a group of eager fresh fish moved into our area and we put several more in the net. The last one of the day being a great fighter, actually making us give chase downstream.

Credit should be given to Gabe Hillebrand and our very own Steve Martinez who put me onto this techniques several years ago. If you haven’t fished big streamers for steelhead, it’s a lot of fun. Unlike drifting flies or fishing a crank bait or spinner, you have complete control over the depth and action of your jig. Swimming jigs is probably most like swinging streamers. There is so much feel with the braided line that we could often feel the difference between a pike or steelhead hit, sometimes not setting the hook if we were sure it was a pike.