The Superior X-Legs fly is the eponymous fly for those looking to catch Steelhead in Lake Superior tributary rivers. It is a nymph pattern created by Duluth’s Jim Pollack that many anglers swear by.
Superior X-Legs Nymph – Click for Recipe at the Fly By Night Guide Service Website
A common rig used on the Brule is to tie on the X-Legs below a float or indicator, and then tie an egg pattern below the X-Legs as a dropper (I like to use “Trout Beads”). The X-Legs bumps along near the bottom and the egg flutters along behind it.
Here’s the “Salmonid Seeker”, Dustin, with an excellent video showing how the fly is tied. Check out his YouTube channel for other videos of Steelhead flies. I’ll be trying out a few myself.
Stephen Rose, George Reynolds and I fished the Sheboygan River today, and we saw way more fish than anyone should expect to see in one day on a river.
Salmon are crazed, sex-driven zombie-monster fish that are incredibly-impressive natural specimens. They are, as I may have mentioned before, very impressive. Nearly every fish we saw today was a King Salmon. They are all, impressively, equivalently-shaped and sized, meaning they are big. I would guess each one is fifteen pounds and about thirty inches long. That’s big. They can move from the mouth of the river to the falls in Kohler in less than twenty four hours. They are made to swim vigorously up stream, through fast and slow water, jumping if necessary. They are not concerned about anything aside from finding a nice place and a nice partner, and once those two conditions have been met, just leave them the eff alone because it’s time to squeeze out some eggs and milt and then die.
Therein lies the conundrum of fishing for lake-run salmon. They aren’t interested in you or your damned flies. Not in the least. In fact they would prefer that you all just go away. Getting a salmon to “eat” your fly is, for me anyway, nigh-on impossible, because they aren’t hungry! They can get pissed, or curious. And then they might snap at your fly. And then you will have hooked one in the mouth. But there’s this thing called “foul hooking”, which is different from “Fair Hooking”. Foul hooking means you have hooked a fish somewhere away from the fish’s mouth, like the dorsal fin or the tail fin. And this happens a lot because when you drift or swing flies through a pod of salmon the hook often sweeps over them. What you’re trying to do is sweep the fly in front of them so they get pissed and snap at it, but as often as your fly goes in front of them, it also goes past them and over them.
So then you have a fifteen pound, thirty-inch-long muscle hooked in a spot that allows the fish to have incredible resistance to your direction of pull. But you don’t necessarily know if the damned thing is hooked right or wrong, so you play the fish (instead of just snapping the fly off your line with a mighty pull). You play the fish because it feels like the biggest freaking monster you’ve ever had on your line and you just want to hoist that thing up a look at it, and then get your picture taken.
So you play it and play it and play it and it goes up and down the river and hunkers down in the holes and mingles with other salmon who say “Nice new piercing, Larry” and so forth, and then maybe when you get a look at it you see that the brilliant monster is hooked on a fin, and then you feel like a jack-ass because you’ve tormented this fish for thirty minutes only to find out the poor, sex-crazed, dying beast wasn’t sportingly hooked in the mouth, and then you can snap it off.
At least that’s what a guy like me, who hasn’t done this much, has come to conclude.
All that being said, the Sheboygan River in Kohler is a very beautiful place that I intend to visit again. And I am grateful to George for his hospitality, patience, flies and sandwiches, and I hope to repay the favor to him soon in the Driftless or the Brule or who-knows-where! I had a great day, and feeling the tug of those beasts on the line is really a thrill, no doubt about it.
Also, I’m not sure, but I think I hooked that fish I’m holding below in the mouth. Honestly I was too thrilled to have it in my hands to remember from whence the hook came as George was removing it. I felt like I’d just gotten off a bucking bronco and was happy to have that prize in my hands. These salmon are wonderful, beautiful (and impressive) creatures and watching them today was a great experience.
A female King Salmon in the Sheboygan River
George and me in Sheboygan
The reason for the season – Salmon Eggs
Stephen with a lunker on
A thirty minute wrestling match with a large fish in Sheboygan
Tomorrow I’m heading to Sheboygan with my fishing buddy Stephen, where we’ll meet up with George, a local Sheboygan-area fly-fisherman, for some Sheboygan River Salmon Fishing (S.R.S.F.).
I’m hoping for a few Kings and maybe some Coho. Sheboygan got 3.2 inches of rain over the weekend. The only question mark is whether the water will “look like cappuccino” in George’s words.
I’m hoping to do like this guy tomorrow…
I geeked out this morning and did some extrapolating (or is it forecasting?). The last time the Sheboygan River was up to 450 CFS was in June, and it came down under 200 CFS in a couple days.
Sheboygan Flow June 2012
I traced the downward-sloping flow rate and plastered it onto the tail end of the flow graph as of this morning, and by tomorrow the flow should be below 200 CFS. Which hopefully means we won’t drown and there will be some new fish in the river.
Sheboygan Flow Oct 2012
That’s the theory anyway.
For any of you thinking this data would be worth banking a trip on tomorrow, I’d suggest you wait until I get back so you can read my trip report before deciding to head out.
Check out the document below on the Brule Steelhead numbers for 2011-2012. The overall run last fall/spring was nearly half of what it has been since 2004. However, the spring run was as big as it’s been in recent history. Looks like those wild Brule Steelhead have strong instincts!
It looks like the Brule rose just a hair this past week. And there’s rain in the forecast this weekend. Keep your fingers crossed!
Those of you who are fans of my sweet minivan will be saddened by the picture you are about to see. The JFT was involved in an on-the-road altercation last month and lost a headlight, cracked a grill, and narrowly avoided an “un-plumbed” radiator.
I removed all of the suspect parts, straightened out some metal with hammers and crow bars, and drilled out all of the bolts I snapped off while trying to carefully remove things.
At the moment, the vehicle looks a bit like a squirrel that got its eyeballs popped out by an eighteen-wheeler.
But there’s hope. I’ve got two brand-spankin’-new headlight assemblies coming in the mail that will get installed this coming weekend, and thanks to my craftiness in all things related to re-bending sheet metal, you’ll be hard-pressed to see any evidence of hardship on the part of the J.F. Thurston-mobile. In fact, I may finally be able to drive down the road at night an actually see what the hell is in front of me. 90′s era Previa headlights are notoriously dim.
I’ll put another picture up after the new headlights are installed, because I understand how important this is to each an every one of you now reading this.
My 1994 Previa Minivan, affectionately named the “Jay Ford Thurston”
Yesterday evening was a special treat. Somehow I worked out a deal with my beautiful wife that allowed me to go fishing one last time in the Driftless this season. Stephen Rose and John Jackels joined me in a trip to the “Whiskey River”, my name for a little stretch of paradise west of town. It was a jaw-droppingly beautiful evening to be out on a trout stream, and I feel so fortunate to have had the chance to go.
Stephen caught his first post-heart-attack trout, and then he caught a half-dozen more for good measure. He was understandably excited about his success, as was I.
John, a consummate outdoorsman, joined us for, I believe, his second ever Driftless trout fishing experience, and he also caught a half-dozen trout, all on dries.
As for me, I was able to hook into a bunch of trout too, many on dries, some nymphs, and one on a big orange streamer.
We finished up the night with a streamside fire, thanks to John’s capable firestarting, and some butter-fried trout cooked up by Stephen. They were the tastiest trout I’ve ever eaten.
It was an experience I won’t soon forget!
John and Stephen casting to fish in the afternoon shadows
Stephen with a bend in his rod
Nicely!
The colors. The Colors!
The beautiful “Whiskey River”
John angling for dinner
There it is.
My best fish Sunday, caught on a big orange streamer.
John and Stephen winding down in the late afternoon.
A fire and some fried fish. What a way to end the day!
I took the morning to ride out to Grant County to a spot I’ve been scoping out. It’s a large stretch of river not crossed by roads, running through a deep valley in the Driftless. It looked very promising on all of my favorite mapping resources like Bing.com/maps, maps.google.com, Google Earth, the Wisconsin DNR Managed Lands website, and the USGS Digital Download Topo Maps website. But seeing a section of a river on a map or via satellite image is not the same as being there.
So I went. When I arrived, I was very pleased. I spent the morning, did a bit of exploring, caught some fish, then had to head back east to do some work. Next time I’ll hope to spend the day, but for now, it was a great way to end the 2012 Inland Trout season, and it will feed my dreams for the next four months.
I’ve been working my way up and down Black Earth Creek over the past few years, attempting to lay eyes on every stretch of that river. I was looking over satellite images of the valley and saw a bend I had not yet visited. So like any curious adventurer I headed west, rigged up, and hiked in to see it for myself.
The section is comprised of a few lazy but significant bends and riffles, and surely there are hundreds of trout hunkered down over a length of 100 yards of the stream. As I approached the tail of the bend I saw a few rise forms upstream where the current collides with the bank. Fish!
The sky was overcast and the stream was slowly coming up in temp from the 50′s to the 60′s. I tied on a little Elk Hair Caddis and cast to the rise forms. On my fifth or sixth cast I was drifting the fly through the zone and saw something floating downstream that I couldn’t identify. It was about the size of a baseball, but brown and shiny, half-submerged in the water. As it passed I looked back upstream to find my fly, but instead saw a turbulent ring in the water. A fish had slurped my fly. And I missed the take. But I had the fish on!
A short tug of war, dominated by yours truly, resulted in my holding the fish below, a beautiful, if diminutive, Brown Trout.
Black Earth Creek Brown Trout, September 2012
I fished a while longer, moving upstream through the bends, casting carefully with dries and nymphs to likely spots. After some time I put on a Pink Squirrel and made a few nice “reach” casts, making the fly swing around to the left and out of sight, hoping to sneak up on something. I felt a big tug and started stripping line. The fish came toward me with a strong fight and headed straight for the plunge pool downstream. I kept good tension on the line and tried to bring the fish up where I could see it, but I couldn’t raise it. The fish kept diving and fighting and I kept easing the rod tip upward to get it into view.
And then, nothing. Somehow my pink squirrel got spit out by that good fish and I was left to wonder what I might have held in my hands.
I noticed that the chenille collar of pink that was once wrapped around the neck of my pink squirrel fly had come unraveled and was now hanging there seductively, looking like a pink worm emerging from a dark gray husk. Perhaps the big fish I’d had on saw the fly in this new arrangement. Perhaps it was just the thing to entice that big fish. Or perhaps the fight with that big fish caused the fly to unravel. Either way, the thing now looked even more appealing, to me anyway, so I continued to fish with it like that. Funny enough, I caught five chubs on it but no trout. I may tie a few like this to see what happens.
I can’t complain about the outing. It was a lovely place with lots of wild and pleasing sounds, and I feel so blessed to be able to zip out and fish there for brief moments almost anytime. Hopefully you’ve got such a place in your life to unwind, recharge, and prepare for what life throws at you.
I’ve been a guided client a few times in my life. I never thought much about how the guide felt during the experience. A guide’s job is to shepherd you through an activity that they know a great deal about, not only teaching you how to do it, but also going a step further to make sure that you are actually having some success while under their tutelage.
What I mean by this is, if you haven’t done something before, you will obviously need to learn a bit about it before you can do it, unless you’re bungee jumping, I suppose. Not much learning there, I wouldn’t think.
Bungee jumping is an easy thing to do successfully, even if you’ve never strapped in to a bungee cord before. The “guide” who shepherds you through the bungee jumping process does arguably half the job of a fishing guide or mountaineering guide.
A newly-made fly fisherman, learning to cast to a dinner plate-sized target.
A fishing guide must show the client how to approach the water, how to cast, where to cast, what to use, how to adjust, and on and on, all the while working his damnedest to find the fish and get them to take the fly so the client can feel successful.
Last November when Stephen Rose and I went up to the Brule and hired Tim Pearson as a guide to show us how to fish for Steelhead, I was generally satisfied to understand the what and the how. I was hoping to catch a fish, but it wasn’t something I expected. If I were to learn the ways of fishing for Steelhead I knew I could return year after year and put that knowledge to use to have success.
But Tim had a serious look of relief when both Stephen and I had each caught a fish. And now I understand why.
A cold water spring dumping out of the hillside in Iowa County, Wisconsin
Showing Eric the ways of spring creek fly fishing on Saturday, I was happy with the job I did teaching him the “how”. I believe he could go out and gear up, hit the water, and make casts to likely holding lies. And if you do that enough, you’ll catch a fish.
I really, really wish I could have gotten a fish onto Eric’s line, but it didn’t happen. I’ve heard stories of clients who were angry with their guides when the didn’t feel like they got their quota of fish. I can’t imagine how I’d handle a client who acted that way, but I know that’s what paying clients expect from a day out with a fishing guide. That’s a big reason for hiring the guide.
Eric was a model client, and I really appreciated that. There was not a hint of blame from him, indeed just the opposite. He showed an appreciation and new knowledge for the challenges of spring creek fly fishing. Eric can do what he pleases with the skills and knowledge he picked up on Saturday. Hopefully the skunking won’t deter him from trying for trout another day.
As for me, I can’t say I’m longing for another chance to be a guide. It was a pleasant day out with a new friend, but I can see how a fisherman who turns his hobby into a job by becoming a guide might start to have mixed feelings about fishing. I plan to get out and teach others to fish, and hopefully more often than not, we’ll get some fish on that line of theirs.
I made good on my decision to get out and fish often this September. Today was an ideal day to spend a little time on the water, with the overnight temps in the 40s, recent rain, and spawning instincts starting to kick in to gear.
A one hour break from work was just the thing, and I hit a big old pool (formerly a millpond spillway, according to local lore) where large trout have been encountered (again, according to local lore).
I decided to throw a Clouser Minnow for a while, letting it sink for a good-long while before stripping it back in erratically. After five minutes of enjoyable long-reach casting I had my fish on, and upon our initial exchange of pull and pull-back I believed it to be sizeable.
It was “respectable”. Which is all anyone can hope for when fishing at 11:30am on a cloudless day in a hole that sees many, many fishermen. I was and am happy to have caught anything, and my time away was satisfying and refreshing.
I have a plan to get out Thursday afternoon and evening with a good friend, and I hope we run into some fish, maybe a big one, or maybe a lot of “respectable” fish. At any rate, I continue to be a happy fisherman and I’m looking forward to more successful outings this September and beyond.
A fifteen-inch Black Earth Creek Brown Trout, Dane County, Wisconsin
