Of claims both bold and implausible made within certain West Coast steelheading circles, perhaps none is more difficult to embrace and hold onto than the belief that the most effective way to find and hook steelhead in autumn is with a swinging, waking fly. The technique will seem particularly far-fetched to anyone who came to the sport of fly fishing in the age of strike-indicating bobbers – or to anyone, I imagine, whose hopes of penetrating the mysteries of steelheading have been inspired by visions of robin-sized flies swimming at the end of gate-chain heavy Skagit heads, launched toward the horizon by propulsive two-handed rods.
To be clear: There is not a single steelheading technique I’ve heard of in my long career that I haven’t investigated closely and vigorously applied. Even indicators. The longing for that first steelhead of the season, or one more before season’s end, is just too great to reject outright any method that might trigger the next strike. At the same time, there comes a moment in most steelheaders’ careers – or maybe it’s a moment in all of our lives – when merely catching another one of these extraordinary fish can seem like something less than the full measure of the goal. You can meet your nutritional needs as well, I suspect, with protein powders and pills. But the point of a meal, like your next steelhead, might carry a lot more meaning if viewed in the light of creativity, craft, and grace – and trust, no doubt, in a wee bit of mercy, in the form of luck, granted by the angling gods above.
MCMILLAN’S STEELHEAD CADDIS
The Waking Caddis is one of a number of waking steelhead patterns I’ve devised and fished over the years, all of them inspired by Bill McMillan’s original Steelhead Caddis, featured in his ground-breaking manifesto, Dryline Steelhead and other subjects, published in 1987, a year or two after the afternoon I caught my very first steelhead, a trio of them on Oregon’s famed North Umpqua. McMillan’s Steelhead Caddis, of course, was his pared down derivation of the classic Muddler Minnow, which he had first used, to good effect, when he began to experience the efficacy of swinging surface flies for summer steelhead. Following years of meticulous record-keeping, and some 2,000 steelhead brought to hand, McMillan eventually concluded that given water temperatures between 48 and 58°F, no other form of presentation moved more steelhead than surface patterns swung on the end of a floating line.
A good deal of the data McMillan used to support his conclusion was collected while fishing his Steelhead Caddis, tied in a half-dozen or so different body colors, from a pale lime-green to a bright, pumpkin orange. More significant than color, however, McMillan noticed the effects on fish of subtle variations in the behavior of the swinging fly, especially when, under tension, the fly broke the water’s surface film and began to leave a distinct, V-shaped wake. Something about the fly disturbing the water, an effect as visible to any holding fish as another SpaceX rocket hurtling across the heavens above our own upturned eyes, seemed to stimulate a response from steelhead, often in the form of that elusive grab all anglers long for.
Often—but, of course, not always. Still, anglers of any stripe, but especially steelheaders, recognize immediately the benefit of spotting evidence whatsoever of fish in the river, in a particular pool or run. And should your waking fly do no more than move a steelhead off its lie, bringing it toward the surface to investigate, if only out of curiousity, what it is that’s swimming by, you’ve still come a long way to improving your steelheading chances and perhaps even understanding your prey.
I can give you nothing but anecdotal testimony as to why I think the waking fly works. Clearly, if you’ve seen caddisflies of any sort on the water, but especially the big clumsy Fall or October (Dicosmoecus) caddis, you know how a fly, real or otherwise, skittering across the water, can trigger an explosive response from any kind of trout. I’m tempted, in fact, to relate the details of a recent famous-river session, swinging a size 18 black caddis over big snooty rainbows and browns, fish showing no signs of feeding but that jumped the waking fly with the violence of NFL linebackers—all of this by way of encouraging you to add the technique to your repetoire of trout tactics, not only to your steelhead game. But that, as they say, is another story.
And, anyway, the real point here is not to sell you on any particular pattern but, instead, to spark your interest in a style of fly and a presentation technique that has proven so successful in my steelhead career and the careers of so many other serious steelheaders.
LESS IS MORE
Following McMillan’s lead, I more or less rejected the traditional Muddler Minnow in favor of his Steelhead Caddis, a pattern that helped me work my way through the fine points of the classic down-and-across steelhead swing, while also figuring out some of the subtle manipulations needed to tease the fly to the surface and keep it pressed against the underside of the surface film throughout its long, tantalizing swing. I experimented, of course, with the Riffle or Portland Hitch, nothing more than a half hitch tied behind the eye of the fly hook after the fly is tied to the tippet. Yet I also discovered that by reducing the fly’s dressing, tying it more and more sparsely, I could achieve an equally pronounced wake without “hitching” the fly, even in slow water, where steelhead would often grab with takes far more subtle than any I had previously experienced. In fact, as I continued to reduce the amount of material I used for my waking patterns, the more I recognized how often steelhead interacted with the fly out of what looked, from what I could tell, as curiousity as much as any feeding response or even defensiveness, as we had been led to believe from early writers and anglers way back when.
At some point I did away completely with the traditional Muddler Minnow’s and McMillan’s Steelhead Caddis’s wing, tied from a mottled turkey feather. And instead of dubbing for the body, which eventually became waterlogged, adding weight to the fly, I began using nothing but silk floss and a few turns of gold or silver tinsel. The critical element of the pattern, I came to believe, was the sparse deer hair head spun directly behind the eye of a light-wire Wilson dry fly hook, the head trimmed neatly with a dozen or two strands left extending rearward or aft toward the bend of the hook.
I reached this point in the evolution of my own waking steelhead flies some two decades ago, years in which vigorous Pacific Coast steelhead numbers helped suggest I was onto something at least as important as how to make a dollar, if not also how to succeed in love. Over the years, I toyed with the colors and even materials of my waking patterns, adding or subtracting this or that, even going so far as tying them on traditional doubles, hooks commonly used by Atlantic salmon anglers from the UK, and still used worldwide by two-hand rod aficionados swinging flies for anadromous salmonids.
The style of my waking steelhead patterns, however, hasn’t changed. And even in the face of dwindling if not seemingly crashing steelhead runs, there comes a time each fall when I put these patterns through their paces, fishing with a confidence, or at least fascination, that I rarely enjoy in search of steelhead anymore. Is it the fly? Or is it me? All we can be absolutely sure of is that you don’t catch steelhead without your fly in the water—and if that distant, sneaky wake intrigues you as much as it intrigues me, maybe it will help you keep that fly swinging, the only place it can move a fish that luck, grace, or whatever brings your way.
Materials
Hook: Wilson dry fly or similar,
size 6-10
Thread: Yellow Pearsall’s Gossamer Silk, or similar
Tag and Rib: Small, flat, silver Lagartun French tinsel
Abdomen: Yellow silk floss
Thorax: Peacock herl
Head/Collar: Sparse spun deer hair, trimmed, with strands extending aft
Tying Instructions
Step One:
Secure the hook. Some years ago Partridge of Reddich, maker of the classic Wilson dry fly hook for salmon and steelhead, discontinued the model. Search online for secondhand sources. Also, their low-water salmon hook, still available, is a decent, but heavier, substitute. Other hook manufacturers make “low water” models. Just make sure you use a hook with an upturned eye, which helps the fly plane and cling to the surface once it comes under tension on the swing.
Step Two:
Start the thread directly behind the eye loop. (Morus Silk now makes a replica of the traditional Pearsall’s silk thread.) Secure the end of a short length of tinsel. Cover the forward portion of the tinsel and the entire hook shank with even thread wraps. This thread layer is important; the abdomen floss, when wet, will hold its color better than if wrapped directly over a black hook shank. Just aft of the hook point, start moving forward with thread wraps. Stop directly above the hook point. Now make two or three turns, coming forward, with the tinsel, creating the tag. Secure the tinsel with a thread wrap or two and leave the remaining tinsel folded back and out of your way.
Step Three:
Secure a short length of silk floss just ahead of the tinsel tag, leaving enough material ahead of the tie-in point to lie flat along the entire hook shank. Wind your thread forward to a point about a third of the way back from the hook eye loop. Create an even abdomen by winding the floss forward. Secure with thread wraps and clip excess floss.
Step Four:
For the thorax, create a small dubbing loop, wax the legs, and insert two or three strands of peacock herl. Spin you dubbing tool to create a tightly twisted rope of herl. Wrap the herl rope forward, stopping directly behind the loop of the hook eye. Secure the herl with thread wraps and clip excess.
Step Five:
Rib the body of the fly with five or six evenly spaced turns of tinsel. Secure the tinsel ahead of the herl thorax and clip excess.
Step Six:
Now for the all-important muddler head and collar. Your first task is to find the correct sort of deer hair – not too stiff, not too fine, and long enough so that the aft pointing strands finish up extending beyond the end of the body or just beyond the hook point. Clip a tuft of hair from the hide and clean out the underfur; remember, the cleaner the hair, the easier it is to spin. Align the tips of the hair in a hair stacker. Remove the tuft of hair from the stacker and hold it along the top of the hook shank with the tips pointing aft just beyond the back end of the body. While still hold the tuft of hair, make a loose wrap of thread over the top of it, then another, and now slowly tighten the wraps, using your off hand to help the hairs spin evenly around the hook shank. Continue to make thread wraps through the now splayed butts of hair. Then pull the butts aft and make several wraps directly in front of them, creating a small tidy head. At this point, with the hairs left untrimmed, I wax my thread, execute a whip finish, and saturate the thread wraps with lacquer.
Step Seven:
Finish the fly by first trimming the splayed hair butts into an even, cylindrical head. Then carefully add to the head by trimming hairs that are standing perpendicular to the hook shank, and those that have gathered in clumps. The goal is to end up with an even, cone-shaped layer of hairs extending beyond the aft portion of the body, all of the hair tips ending just short of the point or end of the hook.