Crushing on Chrome

The enlightenment of a reluctant steelhead angler

In a few days I will head west to the Great Lakes to chase lake-run rainbow trout (hereafter referred to as steelhead)¹. It’s an annual trip that’s become a beloved tradition shared with my dearest fishing comrades. It’s also one of our biggest and most anticipated trips of the year. 

Unlike resident trout, the rainbows that cruise up the small creeks and rivers of Western Pennsylvania and Ohio are commuters, following their ancestral impulses from the ‘inland oceans’ to pea-gravel spawning beds miles upstream at certain times of the year, and only when the conditions are favorable to do so. Once they reach their destinations and carry out their biological raison d'être, they slip back downstream to the shelter of the deep water. 

As you’d imagine, these transient trout make for a beguiling quarry. Once on the move, steelhead seem to employ a foraging mentality and tend to favor energy-rich food like minnows and the eggs of other trout carried downstream. It’s impossible to know if they comprehend the length of their journey, but they exhibit a mastery of energy conservation that suggests they do. Cover, while of utmost importance to a resident brown or brook trout, is second to hydrodynamic structures where a steelhead can rest and refuel. They seem to constantly be on the move, making fishing for them a pleasurable form of cat-and-mouse fun. 

I wasn’t always such a dyed-in-the-wool fan. In fact, I used to be quite stuck up about fishing for Great Lakes steelhead. 

It came into sharp relief three days into our first week-long trip to Ohio in 2019. My brother Reuben and I had called an audible for our spring fishing trip due to blow-out conditions across our original destination. He mentioned reading some articles about Lake Erie steelhead and was intrigued. I was skeptical, but willing to go just about anywhere if it meant salvaging our trip.

Now, I love my brother. He’s the oldest of four kids and six years my senior. He’s been fishing for as long as I can remember. Most, if not all, of my fundamental fishing knowledge can be traced back to when we were boys and I wasn’t much more than a snot-nosed tagalong trying to be like him. So when he offers a fishing suggestion, I go on faith that he’d never knowingly steer us wrong. Still, I wasn’t totally sure. 

Ohio didn’t strike me as a fishy place, certainly not a destination for rainbow trout. All I really knew of Ohio were some vague memories of my grandparents house in a suburb west of Cleveland and stories our father had told us about the Cuyahoga river being so polluted that it caught on fire. (Truth is, the Cuyahoga caught fire about a dozen times before the 1969 blaze that, in concert with a few other incidents and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, led to the formalization of the Environmental Protection Agency the following year.) All I could picture was Blinky, the three-eyed fish from the Simpsons and feared the worst.

Like most snobbish anglers, I sought out ‘trusted’ sources to see if I could get the skinny on the fishery before making the nine-hour journey to our destination, an area referred to as Steelhead Alley. A few fishing friends had heard rumblings, or knew a guy who knew a guy who went to Ohio and ‘caught some decent fish.’ Orvis had fishing reports for Ohio rivers which I figured was a good sign, and Tom Rosenbauer himself even went out there in an episode of The New Fly Fisher. I decided to jump in with both feet and figured that, all things being equal, time on the water with my big brother was a good enough reason to head west, fish be damned. 

Our first couple of days on the water gave us a taste for what we were in for. Reuben hooked a few nice buck in the first run we fished (his first cast) but I remained skeptical. The run, nestled behind a local fly shop in a skinny stretch of brownish water and ringed by old concrete blocks reused as riprap, looked more like a hatchery tank than holding water for trout.

Reuben holds his first Great Lakes steelhead.

A day with a guide on some bigger water turned up some feisty juvenile fish — jacks, the guide called them — and though I wasn’t accustomed to chucking a heavily weighted indicator rig with an 8wt rod, their energetic runs that peeled drag from my saltwater reel made me pay notice. 

On the third day, we worked the water at a narrow pinch point on a popular river. Long periods of quiet casting were broken by fresh fish making streaking runs and acrobatic leaps like freshwater tarpon. I broke heavy tippet. Fish spit hooks in aerial defiance. I finally landed one — a chrome hen that candy caned my Loomis and clocked in at around 27 inches. It was the largest trout I had ever seen in person, let alone held.

That evening, perhaps from exhaustion from a few restless nights in our makeshift sleeping quarters in the bed of Reuben’s Toyota Tundra, or simply a flush of petty indignation at having been so wrong about Ohio, I opened my big fat mouth. 

“I just don’t think it’s very sporting,” I said aloofly. “Catching these fish on their way to spawn…I don’t know if it’s for me.”

Reuben and I haven’t had many fights as adults, but that comment launched us into a stiff disagreement that I won’t soon forget. While I don’t recall the ins and outs of the argument, I do recall that I was being a jerk. Something about catching these fish — the likes of which we’d otherwise only see at the end of a trolling line — had me bent out of shape. And if you’ve ever gotten that version of me, you know the only thing that straightens me out is time. We spent that night in a cheap hotel room, each of us stewing in a springy queen size bed while reruns of The Office blared on an old Panasonic. 

Every epoch has a beginning, a sketchy stretch of time where things are in such flux that it’s impossible to see it for what it is. It’s only when you look back that you realize how significant of a moment it really was. In 2019 we turned a corner in our fishing lives, and we haven’t looked back. 

A small baitfish and a fly that mimics it.

Much has been learned in the years since. Some through trial and error, some dumb luck. Over the last four seasons we’ve been fortunate to meet and fish with some incredible steelhead anglers who’ve shared their spots and strategies. We’ve lightened our rods and refined our terminal tackle. We’ve made note of optimal flows for our favorite rivers, and dropped pins on pull offs where access is best. We’ve developed fly patterns specifically for the fishery, iterating on success and failure like scientists conducting longitudinal studies. There are stretches of water that we now know better than our home waters. 

Introspection is critical in any practice. But I believe it's especially important to review our principles as anglers and come to grips with the reality of things. And reality, as it pertains to steelhead, is one that took me a few years to understand. 

Fishing for Great Lakes steelhead has forced me to accept that as a sport fisherman I am much closer to being a hunter than I previously acknowledged. Much of hunting centers around the mating and migration seasons of animals. It’s just part of the game, and has been since humans fashioned the first spears. Migrations the world over are part of the exchange of biomass of this planet, whether it be caribou or herring. And while the instinct to procreate drives the trout from the shelter of the lakes, it takes skill, grit, and patience to come face-to-face with one. 

I have also had to confront the nature of an unnatural fishery. Today I find it fascinating that steelhead were first introduced into the Great Lakes from the Pacific Basin in the late nineteenth century as an experiment. The hypothesis was that the trout would treat the lakes as they do the ocean, navigating between them and the rivers just as the anadromous West Coast fish do. The experiment worked, a testament to the fish’s evolution and innate will to survive. Every year, thousands of rainbow trout leave the lakes and push upstream to carry out their annual spawning ritual. It’s all kind of miraculous.

The fact that the Great Lakes fishery is an engineered one is problematic to some. We’ve become so precious about wild and native fish that it’s easy to look down our noses at those which have proliferated from human intervention.

Steelhead Alley may be lacking in our narrow definition of wildness, but the fish don’t seem to care. They are carrying out an impulse that goes back millenia, and have adapted to this environment with a vigor that feels primordial and genuine. When that 28-inch steelhead peels drag and leaps like a saltwater gamefish 100 yards downstream you couldn’t care less about which hatchery they came from. 

Now, a few days before heading west, I can’t think of another fish, or destination, that has pushed me more as an angler. I’m grateful for the chance to chase these strange amalgams of evolution, environment, and human intervention. I am thankful for a brother’s patience and for our fishing crew that’s grown up around an expedition of his making. 

But most of all, I am excited. Excited to test new fly patterns and improved rigs. Excited to explore new water and revisit runs marked in our memories by anguish and ecstasy. Excited to look downstream in the fading light of the day at the silhouettes of the best anglers I know making ‘just one more cast.’ Excited to slide into bed with nothing but a day of fishing ahead, and to dream of dime-bright leviathans on the end of my line.

Sitting here, counting down the hours, I wonder, what’s more sporting than that? 

1. Steelhead devotees are divided by definition. Many argue that Great Lakes trout cannot be classified as steelhead. “No salt, no steel,” they are quick to say. And though I have never chased West Coast steelhead, I get it. Those fish are certainly of a different class. But I find the quibbling over definitions to be somewhat pointless.