When you make the decision to become a serious steelhead angler, and you live in Northern California, as I do, then you had better resign yourself to fishing in the wintertime with the cold and the rain in your face. This is not a sport for sissies. A friend of mine has claimed that winter steelhead fishing actually increases your libido. Early on, I discovered that while this was not necessarily true, I would still need a big rod.
When I first moved to California, I discovered that the better steelhead fishing — indeed, just about all steelhead fishing — took place in the winter, when the big sea-run rainbow trout came back from the Pacific Ocean to spawn. If I wanted to pursue summer-run steelhead within earshot of a crystal rapids, with the sunshine releasing the perfume of wild blackberries into the air, then I had better move to Oregon.
In California, the real thing didn’t even begin until late November. On the Russian River, my home stream, this kind of fishing often took place in a landscape of seemingly constant cold fog and river mist relieved by brilliant afternoons when the sun struck the redwoods at an oblique angle.
At dawn, I would walk out into a static world of twisted oaks and heavy winter grasses, the river polished to a dark, antlerlike sheen. The valley air was scented with wood smoke. Houses along the river, set back in a tangle of trees and ferns, appeared dim and indistinct when viewed through a curtain of fog and drizzle. The absence of light in the morning fog suggested other absences that translated into an undefined, but sharply felt melancholy. Among other things, I wondered how people living along the riverbanks could stand the eternal damp and mildew.
Sometimes the land was covered in a clinging ground mist known as valley fog. Fly lines disappeared into the vapor. A pale sun burned weakly behind the haze, and the cold and dampness penetrated everything.
Farther upstream lay wine country, and I discovered vineyards carpeted with mustard. There were great flocks of starlings over the fields, and deer browsed in the bottomlands, their coats full and lustrous. I cast into bank shadows, my line backlit by a sun sinking into bare willows and poplars.
It was a big river, flowing more than a hundred miles through a broad pastoral valley of vineyards, dark redwood groves in the lower reaches, and gentle Pacific dairy farms in its final, widening stretches. If the sandbar at the mouth was open, salmon began entering around late September or early October. By Thanksgiving, steelhead were showing up in the lower river. Although by all accounts the fishing was once epic, old anglers describe the present-day river valley more as a museum or ruined mausoleum. I must have made a thousand casts before I caught my first Russian River steelhead.
But they were there: in the shallow Austin Riffle and in the pool known as Watson’s Log. At a place called Freezeout and near the redwood groves above the Wohler Bridge. At Oddfellows Park and under the green, shadowy banks behind the Foppiano Vineyard.
Yet these fish were not enough. Because the Russian River was so tame, so domesticated, its fishing never quite satisfied. And so after the first good rains of winter, I would find myself making the long ride up the coast to the little town of Gualala.
The Gualala River, located a hundred miles north of San Francisco on the Mendocino border, was in many ways typical of California’s shorter coastal streams. But in another, more meaningful sense, it was one of a kind and priceless. I first saw the river canyon on a mild winter afternoon with the sunlight filtering down into a grove of redwoods. The river was the chalky green color steelhead anglers love.
Each bend in the canyon held a curving bar of sand and gravel on one side and a deep, green pool, bulging against steep rocks, on the opposite bank. When rain raised the level of the river, steelhead entered from the tidal lagoon. As the river dropped and cleared, the pools under the redwood trees began to freshen or “green up.” When the pools turned to just the right shade of light green, when I could almost see my wading boots on the bottom of the river, then the steelhead seemed to strike freely. But as the days passed and the level of the river continued to drop, the pools turned emerald, and the steelhead, feeling less secure, seemed disinclined to take a fly in the clear water and would often slide down into the deeper corners of the pool. When it was extremely low, you could sometimes stand on a high bank, look down into one of these refulgent pools, and see dozens of steelhead bunched up on the bottom. This up-and-down cycle of the river was repeated with each rainfall. After heavy rains, the river ran light brown for several days (there had been altogether too much logging in the hills) before changing back to that soft, inviting shade of green.
Steelhead used the rain-swollen river to swim up into the shallower spawning tributaries. Later in the season, I would hike into the upper canyon and see steelhead paired off on shallow gravel beds. The backs of the rainbows were mottled like river stones, so at first I couldn’t see them, only their rippling shadows.
Everyone fished the slow, green pools of the lower river with sinking lines. The trick was to work the fly directly at the level of the fish. A fish’s metabolism slows down considerably in colder water, so winter steelhead weren’t likely to move very far to take a fly. The depth the fish held at and the speed of the river determined whether I needed a moderate or a fast-sinking line. On the slower pools of the Gualala, I noticed that the more successful anglers fished their flies as deeply as possible without actually snagging bottom, all the while managing a natural drift on the swing. By avoiding drag — that is, the pull of a fly against the current — the feathered offerings passed through the pools at the same speed as the current. On the gravel bars, I heard a good deal of esoteric talk about flies “breathing” underwater and saw any number of interesting, fanciful patterns. Much later on, I figured out all one pretty much needed to know about steelhead f lies: when the river was high and cloudy, one used larger, fairly buoyant flies with good silhouettes; when the river was low and clear, one used smaller, more subdued flies and lightened the leader. Just how light was relative. The average size of a Gualala River steelhead was about eight pounds, but I saw fish taken out of the river that easily could have gone up to fifteen pounds.
I learned that winter steelhead generally favored the lower ends of the pools. When the river was prime, they held in the shallow tailouts, in the light dip at the bottom where the water began to break over the lip of a pool. It always surprised me whenever I would find big fish in shallow water. But such was the case. Only when the pools dropped and the water became exceptionally clear would steelhead seek the safety of the deeper water.
The Gualala pools had a certain local fame and fanciful names taken from nineteenth-century logging operations. At early morning, I found the better fishing to be at the lower end of the wide gravel bar known as Switchville. Later, I would cross upstream and fish the pool where the North Fork entered the river. Steelhead waited for the river to rise so they could ascend the tributary and spawn. In the evenings, steelhead in the lower end of Miner Hole grew restless. At any time, a steelhead might erupt against the surface of the green pool and shatter the stillness. And during evening high tides, rolling fish often were spotted at the very wide pool known as Mill Bend, just below the Highway 1 bridge.
These broad pools called for deep wading and long casts. This meant heavy lines that could turn a fly over smoothly at great distances. In some quarters, it had become fashionable for fly fishers to try to take steelhead on extremely light wands. This was not normally the case on the Gualala among the more hardcore and serious veterans. Watching a steelhead twist one of these insubstantial rods into a pretzel one morning made me think of a friend who refused to eat nouvelle cuisine on the grounds that it was toy food. Light rods were for trout.
The deep, slow pools of the Gualala not only called for long casts, they demanded smooth presentations. There were no ruffled surfaces to hide a blown cast or dampen the slap of a line on the water.
Another thing I was told to expect was that winter steelhead can have a very soft take. It seemed a contradiction. Yet when the giant fish mouthed a fly, often the only thing one felt on the end of the line was a slight hesitation and a soft pull. More often that not for me, these hesitations translated into bottom snagging. After a while, my heart no longer leapt each time I hooked a weed or nicked a stone.
A typical day of steelheading on the Gualala might begin at Sonoma County Park on the south bank. Here a path disappeared into the perfectly diffused light of the redwoods and led down to a sun-drenched gravel bar at the foot of Miner Hole. After fishing through the splendid lower pool and tailout, I would hike upstream along the wide gravel bar, my breath condensing in the cold air, and ford the river below Thompson Hole. If it was early afternoon, the deep water bulging against the south bank would be catching the first shadows, so chances of hooking a steelhead were greatly improved. At midstream, a submerged redwood stump created a barely visible surface wake. Here, steelhead rested in the lee of the log. The tailout also was superb.
From Thompson’s, I might ford the stream once again and proceed upriver to Donkey or the Snag Hole. Or I could make the long trek back to Miner Hole to catch late-afternoon shadows sliding off the north bank. Now the sun would be holding at a low angle, and much of the river would be stuck in glare. This would gradually subside, and with luck, steelhead would start rolling within the looming shadow of the lower pool. It would fish well into evening.
Later, standing on the gravel bar at dusk, talking with the other anglers, I might see a moonrise over the redwoods, one of the nature’s more indelible moments. It was often set in a twilight so deep and perfectly still as to feel warm, despite the bitter night. I could easily work up religious feelings about those evenings in the canyon.
But the best fishing of all generally took place in the grayish light of dawn. I would set out from the coastal town of Gualala under a brooding headland darkness, surf crashing against the sandbar at the end of the lagoon, sea wind blowing into the cypress breaks. Some mornings, the gravel bar at Switchville resembled a parking lot; other mornings, it was eerily deserted. Often I would join a gauntlet of anglers who had materialized out of the gray dimness. The steelhead were fresh from the ocean and hadn’t been in the river long enough to be spooked. They were gathering for their big run up the North Fork tributary.
One particular dawn, standing in the lower pool at Switchville and shaking with cold, I noticed a nervous agitation in the shallow water directly upstream. I watched as a steelhead slipped in over the lip of the pool. A soft drizzle began, and pretty soon the steeply forested canyon filled with a heavier downpour. Steelhead were moving into the pool under the cover of the rain. I felt a slight tug at the end of my line, and I brought the rod up on a boiling fish. I lost that steelhead and blew two more hookups.
In the turbulent light of the rainstorm, the mysterious inner life of the canyon was revealed in moss and lichen gleaming wetly on the rock face and in the pale undersides of leaves kicked up by the wind. From steeply rising banks, a thicket of ferns and tangled underbrush receded into the rain and permanent darkness of the redwoods.
I remember another dawn at Switchville, fly lines slicing over the pool in the first glimmer of morning. The angler beside me came up on a steelhead so large and powerful I thought it would pull him into the river. It took him fifteen minutes to land and was as bright as a bar of silver. I could see the sea lice on its flanks.
And then there was that time at the lower end of Miner Hole, the pool obscured by shadow. Four or five of us were swinging our lines through the best water. Toward the later part of the afternoon, something began to happen. It was as if someone had thrown on a wall switch. Out of nowhere, a steelhead slapped the surface. We heard the explosion and stared at the rings. An angler below me covered the fish with a long, heroic cast. His line drew forward and he pulled up tight on the steelhead. It was a fish of about ten pounds, and when it was beached, I saw a faint lateral scarring, as if it had once struggled in a trawler’s net. Intermittently, steelhead began to roll throughout the pool.
With trembling fingers, I worked a wind knot out of my tippet and tied on a small black-and-green fly. A steelhead rolled above me, and I waded upstream to cover the fish. My line swung though the steelhead’s lie, and when it drew forward, I brought the rod up, sharp. It came as a great surprise, as all steelhead do. It was like hooking a log that suddenly came to life. The steelhead thrashed at the end of the line and led me down the pool. I managed to beach it after a long struggle. It was a hen fish of about seven pounds. I saw that its dorsal fin had been rubbed smooth. A hatchery fish? It was as bright as a winter moon.
Another angler had a fish on downstream, but it unhooked itself almost at once. Other anglers stepped into the stream. There seemed to be a hierarchy to the pool, with the better fly fishers crowding the lower end. And then, as abruptly as it began, the pool turned off. Again as if someone had thrown a switch. I fished until dark without further luck and walked back under the black redwoods to the car. That night in the bar at the old Gualala Hotel, the conversation centered on how fine everything had been. I remember thinking to myself: Well, I guess I’m a steelhead fisherman.
I learned an awful lot that first winter on the Gualala. That the fishing could be slow, but the canyon magnificent, full of meaning beyond its obvious beauty. I have fished many other steelhead rivers since, but when my mind turns to winter steelhead fishing, I think first of the Gualala. It’s one of the few things I’m sentimental about. The river taught me everything I know.
