ICE FLOES AND RAINBOWS - Matt Straw

I tend to associate perfect wintering pools with small- to medium-sized streams. I’ve found winter steelhead concentrated in pools that fit all the criteria (slow, wide, shallow, and dark) in larger environments, but I think steelhead can find those elements associated with most complex pools in big rivers. In other words, a relatively small part of a big pool can offer shallower water with dark bottom and reduced current. 

  

When you catch a dozen from one relatively small pool, it makes you wonder. Was it populated with 50 steelhead? How many were there? No way to know, but one thing’s certain—they aren’t going anywhere until the water warms. 

 

We stood waiting for gaps in the surface ice cascading down the river. Temperatures below 0°F super chilled the river overnight. Our temperature gauges came out of the flow registering 31°F. Colder than ice.

The resulting ice floes discouraged several anglers who walked down to the river. First came a group of fly fishermen. They surveyed the scene for a few seconds and beat a hasty retreat to their trucks. Then a couple lure fishermen with Yakima Flat Fish clipped to their hook arbors came and went just as quick.

They left knowing the ice floes would cancel out their horizontal presentations by lifting lines, flies and lures right out of the water. The best way to fish ice floes is with a float. When a pocket of open water passed by we pitched heavily weighted float rigs into them, using oversize floats usually reserved for much bigger rivers. Sometimes a drift lasted only 10 feet before the rig was overtaken by ice. But at least we were fishing. And on a bend, the ice is swept to the middle of the river, allowing long drifts along the edge until an opening appears farther in.

 

 

 

 

 

Anchor ice forms on streambeds in these conditions. Dr. Paul Seelbach (now with the USGS in Michigan) discovered a direct correlation between the coldest days and the survivability of steelhead parr. When air temperatures drop to -20°F, fewer young fish survive, according to his findings. Anchor ice locks up the invertebrate pantry, and extremely cold flows have dire effects on growing fish. The longer extreme cold spells last, the more young steelhead die before they can smolt.

It can happen anywhere in the Great Lakes region. The environment around Lake Superior is actually colder in terms of average annual air and water temperatures than the environments steelhead experience at the northern extreme of their natural range in Alaska. Yet steelhead adapted, and reproduced naturally in many Superior tribs for over 100 years, even on the North Shore. Anchor ice is one reason poor year classes occur.

Adult steelhead are another matter. Few fish are more aggressive in 32°F water. Great Lakes steelhead shrug at water colder than ice, but anglers tend to stay home. Silence fails to describe calm winter days in the north woods. A complete absence of sound isn’t silence. It’s a vacuum. Like outer space. But under the cedars and towering white pines frozen in place, the rivers run—alive with beating hearts of crimson and silver. Even in the most extreme conditions, steelhead continue to bite and fight.

 

Mary Savage with a nice fall-run steelhead from Winter Pool.

 

One winter I hooked a 10-pound hen in Wisconsin when my thermometer told me the water should be frozen solid. She raced under a shore-bound ice shelf, jumped and broke through, like a silver missile fired from an Arctic submarine, blasting into the air with an attendant shower of ice shards and frigid water.

Steelhead continue biting when the water is so cold the surface is covered with glittering shards of instantly forming ice on the pools below rapids, dams and waterfalls. Sometimes, those are the only places with enough open water to fish when air temperatures drop below 10°F because the ice is broken up.

My partners and I have hooked a lot of steelhead in these conditions over the years, because we know what steelhead know: There are places where the frigid, often lethal characteristics of ice-bound rivers are minimized. One particular pool on a Michigan stream has produced over a dozen mature steelhead in one afternoon on many occasions over the past 30 years. It’s the pool in the attached diagram. (Forgive me if I fail to mention precisely where it is.)

We call it Winter Pool. I know—not too creative, but apt. In conditions like those described, we make the long hike directly to that pool without stopping to fish anywhere else. Steelhead will drop back to that pool and congregate. We know because tagged fish caught upstream in the weeks prior were caught again in Winter Pool.

 

 

 

 

When you catch a dozen from one, relatively small pool, it makes you wonder. Was it populated with 50 steelhead? How many were there? No way to know, but one thing’s certain—they aren’t going anywhere until the water warms. If we returned on consecutive days, the results were always the same—about a dozen fish banked, if we followed a strict regimen of resting the pool for at least 10 minutes after hooking each fish.

Wasting precious time (days are short) and energy walking to empty pools in heavy snow can blur distinctions. Is this a sport or a death march? Well, it can be an essential, vibrant, rewarding affair, because steelhead often concentrate in easily-identified pools, drastically reducing the need to cover water, when water temperatures drop below 35°F. Finding solitude in such places is quite probable when snow settles thick in the forest—simply because so many weekend warriors have yet to identify how this phenomena works.

Or they hate winter. But how is it possible to feel cold when steelhead hit you with a pulse of pure, primal energy from flowing water through a fishing line, as if the drift crossed the beating heart of the river itself?

 

The best pools have a dark bottom that absorbs sunlight and hides steel-head. During the coldest weather, Winter Pool may produce few strikes before 10 a.m. or after 2 p.m., making mid day the prime period.   

 

 

How Fall Determines Winter

Steelhead that run in the fall push upriver until they find a compromise between comfort and the urge to reach spawning gravel in short to moderately long systems. Comfort is determined by how much water they have over their heads at this point. They may not go far up a low clear river. They run farther up rivers swollen with rain. But as the water levels drop, most (not all) steelhead drop back downriver.

But they also seem to know what they’ll need during winter. Find that “compromise zone” during late fall and you’ll find fish in that area all winter long.

It requires fishing. Catching a few doesn’t count. You have to keep at it until you find the mother lode. Steelhead move up in pods during fall in the far northern extremes of the steelhead world. Perfect conditions produce the biggest pods. As they move upriver, different pods hold in the same pools, almost as if they leave a scent marker. Many pools that held fall fish in the past might produce very few, if any, hookups over an entire fall-winter period. Those same pools might hold fish again next year, but something keeps concentrations of steel from holding there—some common perception made by every steelhead passing through. Don’t ask why.

 

 

 

 

It may have to do with incremental changes in water level or water color from one year to the next. It may have to do with settling sediment, and the extent or absence of big floods during the year. Or it may be determined entirely by the vanguard—the earliest fish in the run. If they stop and decide to hold overnight, almost every pod of steelhead that comes up the river for the remainder of the fall period seems to hold in that pool before moving on.

On shorter rivers, the final destination before winter sets in is determined, to some extent, by water level. Over the past 20 years, a group of 8 steelheaders (including myself) have fished the rivers of Michigan for a week during the late fall period. We split up and cover different segments of different rivers. Invariably, somebody will find a concentration of fish within a 2- to 4-mile segment of a certain river. By the third day, most of us descend on that portion of that river like a plague of locusts.

We do this because we know the fish come up in pods and they maintain relative proximity to one another. The hottest fishing is typically confined to one segment of the river or the other by late fall. Some-times the fish move (especially after a rain event), but within a day or two another pod may come to take their place, holding in the same pools and the same lies.

 

Matt Straw caught this cold water Muskegon River steelhead in 10°F weather.

 

Some steelhead wander way upstream of the heaviest pods, and some linger far downstream. Finding them is fun, but the best fishing will be confined to one particular stretch throughout fall and winter. When I come back to Michigan during January or February, I always start where the fishing was hottest in late fall. About 90-percent of the time, the best winter fishing will be found in that same stretch of water, if not those very same pools, that produced the best fishing in November or early December.

We also discovered that, as water levels steadily dropped over the last 15 years due to reduced rainfall, that “hot segment” we sought drew progressively closer to the mouth of the river. In other words, the lower water levels become, the shorter the migration to wintering habitat becomes, the less fish you tend to find there, and the farther downriver the compromise zone will be. If heavy rains and floods drew them farther upriver, they seemed to drop back to the compromise zone when water levels returned to that year’s normal level.

Compromise zones settled by steelhead for the winter can be above or below gravel they will use when they spawn—or both. We need a tracking study, and even that probably wouldn’t allow us to make all-encompassing statements. The studies we can access suggest that, as water levels increase, more fish run in fall. Up to 80% of fish that would normally run in fall can simply decide not to when rivers are low and clear.

 

 

 

 

A Dow Chemical Plant sits near the mouth of Michigan’s Pere Marquette River. I used to wade in there at first light in low-water years, when the water was 38°F or so, and get a few hours in before security came to threaten me and illegally run me off the property. My feet stayed in the river and, according to Michigan law, I was within my rights (wouldn’t surprise me if today’s state government didn’t change the laws at Dow’s behest, so do your research). Anyway, during extreme low-water years, steelhead would nose into the river from Pere Marquette Lake by the dozens at dawn, then slip back down to the lake by about 9 a.m. We know most of the steelhead didn’t continue upriver because, while I was landing 10 or more, nobody fishing immediately upstream caught more than one, if any at all.

If the water rises, all those fish would run upriver. At that point, compromise zones upriver will hold more fish than staging areas near the mouth. Compromise zones dissolve into many staging zones directly above or below major spawning areas, yet prime wintering habitat remains equally important. Steelhead do not just hold anywhere in the coldest flows.

Mark Chmura, one of Michigan’s premier steelhead guides, notes that floods and high water draw huge pods of steelhead way upriver on the Big Manistee River in early October. But, as water levels steadily drop, he found them 1/4-mile farther downriver every day until they finally settled into a comfort zone for both existing water levels and the onset of winter.

Somewhere in that comfort zone there will be a decent to perfect example of a Winter Pool.

 

RON CAMP 

 

Perfect Wintering Pools

Winter steelhead are a lot like you. Think about walking down a city street into a 30 mph wind with air temperatures below 20°F. Do you like it? Probably not. That’s wind chill. Steelhead experience “current chill.” When water temperatures drop below 35°F, expect steelhead to drastically reduce contact with current.

When it’s 20°F outside, do you want to sit in the shade? Neither do steelhead. When water temperatures drop to just above freezing, don’t expect to find many steelhead holding around logs, fallen trees, or boulders. Don’t expect to find many at the bottom of a 10-foot pool, either—unless that’s the only slow water they can find.

Steelhead want reduced current and sun on their backs in the coldest water. Per-fect wintering pools will be found where the land levels off and gradient is reduced. Winter Pool is wider than the river above or below it. Width reduces current speed by spreading it out. The perfect pool is rela-tively shallow—often only 3 feet deep—and dish-shaped—not a perfect pool at all when the water is warmer than 35°F. Most steel-head tend to hold near the precise center of the pool. Some may hold in the center of the river just above the tail-out. The best pools have a dark bottom that absorbs sunlight and hides steelhead. During the coldest weather, Winter Pool may produce few strikes before 10 a.m. or after 2 p.m., making mid day the prime period.

 

 

 

 

Some rivers have no pools like that at all, but steelhead will find approximations that allow them to 1) escape the heaviest flow while 2) getting maximum exposure to the sun. Other factors determine whether or not steelhead use such a pool. If a river’s best winter pool is miles above the current compromise zone, only a few intrepid specimens may wander up there. Generally, Winter Pool will hold steelhead all season, but it’s often not the best pool in that river every winter.

I tend to associate perfect wintering pools with small- to medium-sized streams. I’ve found winter steelhead concentrated in pools that fit all the criteria (slow, wide, shallow, and dark) in larger environments, but I think steelhead can find those elements associated with most complex pools in big rivers. In other words, a relatively small part of a big pool can offer shallower water with dark bottom and reduced current. Call it the winter portion of a pool—often a depression out of the main flow, toward the inside of a bend, and sometimes quite close to shore.

A classic example is a pool below a big bend. Water is directed to the outside of the bend, so the entry to the next pool below the bend is deeper, and the current is faster, on that side. The water from the inside of the bend is directed over shallow rocks that further decelerate the flow. If depth increases, here, to 3 or 4 feet over a dark bottom, look for steelhead to concentrate near the top of this “pool within a pool,” even if it’s less than 10 feet from the bank. In which case, approach slowly and carefully—head down—without wading if possible.

 

Steelhead want reduced current and sun on their backs in the coldest water. Perfect wintering pools will be found where the land levels off and gradient is reduced. Winter Pool is wider than the river above or below it. 

 

In many big rivers, wintering areas should be covered first thing in the morn-ing whenever water temperatures dip below 38°F in late fall or early winter. Current tends to be deceptively stronger in big rivers. Even where they look slow, steelhead may perceive big-river currents differently, and find current chill uncomfortable—even unbearable—where we perceive it to be moderate.

 

Other Factors

Fall-run fish tend to spawn earlier than spring-run fish. Spring fish may trickle into rivers during appreciable thaws, but are just as apt to drop back when temperatures plummet.

Evidence now suggests that fall-run steelhead sometimes spawn in 36°F water in Great Lakes tribs, suggesting an earlier day-length window than spring-run fish, which rarely seem to spawn in water colder than about 40°F. Which is why, after a huge fall run and several weeks of fantastic winter fishing, short to mid-length systems can suddenly seem barren of steelhead after a substantial mid-winter thaw.

If the opposite occurs, information shared here can lead to spectacular days on the water. When daytime temperatures plummet overnight from the 30°F range to around 10°F, many of the steelhead in a section of river can suddenly concentrate in one pool. It’s amazing. Amazing how few steelheaders know this, and amazing how readily these fish bite after such a drastic change in barometric pressure. Bass would be comatose. Walleyes would have their mouths sewn shut. But the first steelhead to be hit on the nose with the right bait will take it, even in flows registering 31°F.

 

 

 

 

In these situations, it’s almost impossible to catch every fish in the pool. The first 5 to 10 fish hooked will spook the rest. After landing one, sit down in the snow. Marvel at the solitude. Break out a flask. Wait 10 to 15 minutes before making another cast—then try to recreate the last drift precisely. Cast to the same spot and hold the rod in the same way. Often as not, another steelhead will position in the same spot, for a perfectly sensible reason: It’s bound to be a comfortable lie.

Who wants to go fishing in such conditions? Fingers turn purple, faces go numb, and guides freeze up after every other cast. Feet turn into blocks of cement. Breathing is painful. Eyebrows freeze. Waders won’t bend.

All of which is the point. Drifting a line through water colder than ice across the beating heart of winter isn’t for everybody. Making some of us extremely thankful.

 

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