I cut my steelhead teeth on Naples Creek rainbows, and then Irondequoit Creek steelies, when the banks were still strewn with LIFTERS! If the water was up, we couldn't see the fish we were catching (when we were lucky), but in the same spots when the water was lower, a careful approach would often reveal a hen working a small area and two or more males below her vying for position. As the season progresses on many of these smaller streams, these are the only fish, and the only players as well. All the action is over if you catch the hen, but the aggresssive males, the more the merrier, would hit fine. And the hen would often pick up the errant cast that went too far upstream, if only to get that "flashy thing" out of the redd area. One of the best areas I've ever seen for swinging a fly is a riffle where the only reason the fish are there is because they are spawning, if they were running they would be moving right through this water, but they respond incredibly to a fly. If the water is up, I can't see them doing it, but they are spawning there, for sure.
I also fished Maxwell Creek years ago where it dumps into the estuary. These fish were mainly spawning at night, or during heavy overcast, but would drift up and down the run during the day, and slide up to the redds if undisturbed. Again, we had some great C+R on small flies,both swinging down to the apprehensively waiting pods or upstream dead drift to the shallower areas when the standing wave shift told us that three or four had moved up. I've seen similar behavior when I've been on the SR in the spring, but the river is bigger, and the pod of fish you think are holding to feed after finishing spawning may be working an active redd slightly upstream that you can't see. Certainly, the literature on these fish indicates that they head downstream for bigger water after completing spawning, but my recollection of the biology of the males is that they can keep producing milt until there are no more hens or they are exhausted, so even though they are black and "aging" they are still looking to spawn further. Deer season is pretty much timed to coincide with the rut, but that doesn't keep deer hunters out of the woods!
A great Ithaca fisherman who passed away a few years back, Eric Seidler, caught a dime bright 6.5 lb hen rainbow up from Cayuga Lake just starting to loosen her eggs, on a hare's ear nymph in Salmon Creek at Ludlowville on June 23 one year! I watched 4 bright fish swim over an obstruction in Irondequoit Creek where I was working on the 1st of May this year, triggered by a quarter inch of rain the night before. Yes, they run early, but a few run late especially in cool years like this one.
L13
post edited by salmotrutta - 2007/05/18 16:06:51