Late Fall Steelhead Report - Toronto, 12/03/2011

This season has been quite long, I mean, I wasn’t expecting to be fishing in such good conditions by the beginning of December. Last year I was already planning a trip for some warm water fishery during this time of the year because all creeks around here and even fastest runs on the Credit River was already frozen up. I tried to use silicone spray to keep the ice off from my gears and so on but I couldn’t find any product satisfactory enought to fish confortably in the winter. Maybe when conditions are like that it is better just to leave the nature in peace and let the fish accumulate energy for the spawning season. I will be fishing, though, whenever conditions allow, and it seems that we still have December fishable after all this rain that we got.

The streams west of Toronto are completely blown out right now, it should be clear up in a couple of days, but on the east I am sure it is already fly fishable…

It seems that the nature really protects the fish because I was sure that today would be a great day on the eastern creeks, however my car’s breaks were behaving really weird in the morning while driving in the rain, so I change my route to the mechanic.

I don’t know if the Steelhead run will come now with the same force as it was before all that rain that we got this week, but for sure there will be a good number of fish available in the system. It is just that, in these last two weeks, there was so many fish in the eastern tributaries before that rain that I doubted if it would get any better after the rain as usual. Oddly, Duffins Creek, for example, really slow down the number of hook ups after the rain. It seems for me that the fish made their way upstream or just spread out through the entire creek, as opposed to being packed in the lower section.  This is actually healthy because when the fish spreads the pressure also spread and the fish becomes less stressed, and more active. If on the one hand we are not finding our preferred hole is not so full of fish, on the other hand the fish that are holding there now will be way more active. There is nothing better than fishing a stream in this type of situation. However, late in this week I will turn my attention to the streams west of Toronto. I am sure there will be a whole bunch of fellows fishing roe under a float this weekend and they will catch fish, but for fly fishing we need to wait a little bit more…

An interesting fly that was working pretty well before all this rain was the white egg yarn fly tyied mixed with the Peach McFly foam. I had a especially good early morning while fishing this fly weightless in a very slow flow run that was packed with fish. This fly even outfished some roe guys. I realized that the fewer elements we have when the fish is under too much pressure the better. I was pretty much swinguing this fly in the pool and I never expected that a Steelhead would grab an egg fly fished in that way, an egg fly fished in the wet fly mood. I also noticed that usually the fish that I was not seeing were the ones who were smashinh this flies more often. So, when the water is too clear and there is too much angling pressure, my advice is to target fish that we are not seeing, but we know it is there…

I hope you guys all have a great weekend full of Steelies! Release the wild ones at least, please...

Early morning Steelhead, wake up adrenalina!

Sweet afternoon on easternToronto's creeks