A COMING PANDEMIC WITH NO CURE
Steelhead Fever
By Bill Schneider, 4-01-08
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| He'll never be cured. Larry Sullivan with a nice steelhead on a fly. Photo by Gary Lewis. | |
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Any angler who has had a steelhead on knows about this disease, but only a small minority has had this misfortune. Worse, those who have it probably aren’t aware of their ailment or realize that it’s extremely contagious--and has no cure or vaccine to prevent it from spreading.
Blissfully, the carriers are out there, the steelheaders, along with an army of outdoor writers like yours truly, spreading Steelhead Fever. If they keep this up, we’ll have a regular pandemic on our hands.
To illustrate, one day last winter my son called me while driving back to Montana from the Seattle area. He’s an avid angler, but not affected, yet, or else he would have known.
The call went something like this: “The weather sucks. It’s snowing like crazy, no visibility, and the roads are so bad they might not let me over Snoqualmie Pass. But along this river I’m driving along, there are guys fishing in every pool, hundreds of them. It’s brutal out there. What’s going on with these guys?”
Immediately, I knew the answer. Steelheaders. Once hooked, nothing stops them. When steelhead are in the river, no weather keeps them home. Nor work, financial woes, or divorce proceedings. Not even a good football game.
So, bosses and wives of the world, have a little sympathy. These guys (and they’re mostly guys) are really sick. They have incurable Steelhead Fever. A little understanding would be appreciated.
Every pandemic has to start somewhere. In this case, the two hot spots of the disease are the rivers of Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes states. But all computer models show the disease spreading rapidly, even sweeping through Bass Country down there south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Imagine all those $100,000 bass boats gathering dust while their owners are up in Oregon and Michigan wading rivers all day casting for steelhead.
For the non-affected, be forewarned. If you happen to run into a steelheader at the saloon or boat ramp, this could be a life-changing event. A few words can contaminate you. Try to be strong and fight it off. If you succumb and travel to one of these places and try steelhead fishing, even once, you’re one of them. One hook up, and you’re incurable, if not unbearable.
The fever has one good symptom. Steelheaders have a single-mindedness about them that fosters tolerance. They could go fishing for bass or trout and probably have a section of stream all to themselves. But when they go to a steelhead river, they find steelheaders in every pool, behind every logjam, lined up along every deep run, lurking everywhere.
But they don’t care. They still go to their “secret spots” that thousands of other steelheaders know about, despite copious amounts of lies and misinformation they spew out to keep them “secret.” They squeeze in somewhere with barely enough room to cast and don’t complain about the crowds.
They walk or drive to their favorite hole in the dark of night to be among the first one to claim a rock to stand on. But they only have a few moments of solitary sunlight before their brethren comes to share the hole.
Compare that to a trout fancier whose day is ruined if he sees another angler on a mountain lake. But this small upside pales in comparison to the downside to getting hooked on these tail-walking, drag-burning, sea-run rainbows on steroids. Not only do steelheaders miss a lot of work (if they still have a job) and family dinners (if they’re still married), but even when they aren’t on the river, they can’t concentrate on anything else because they’re thinking about being on the river. At the office, you can easily spot them. Remember the movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Now you understand how Steelhead Fever manifests itself.
On the trout rivers out here in Montana, which I’m sorry to admit is a steelhead-deprived state, we frequently see Hollywood anglers who look like models stepping out of an Orvis ad, but barely able to cast. You don’t often see this with steelheaders. They’re gear looks like it should look, used. You don’t see many fashion statements on steelhead rivers, but you do see a lot of guys who know what they’re doing and not wanting to stop fishing even for a minute to talk about it, let alone eat lunch or smoke a cigar.
Once they have the fever, they’re out there at every opportunity, casting and casting and casting, until they need to go in for a rotator cuff operation. And then sleeping in the back of their pickup truck so they can be among the first doing it again in predawn of the next morning.
Now, as you surmised, my confession. I have it, the fever. I caught it last year when I landed my first steelhead out on the Wilson River on Oregon Coast, but I hooked all six fish I caught by bouncing spawn along the bottom with a spinning rig. It was a blast, for sure, but since I prefer fly fishing, I felt unfulfilled. I had to catch steelhead on a fly to be a whole man, so that’s what I did. I’m just back from fly fishing the steelhead rivers in Northeast Oregon, and check back on Friday for how and where I did it.
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