For the past couple months, the valley steelhead in our local rivers have been locked in on the egg bite. My days start at O-dark-thirty and run until I feel like calling it. The fish have mostly been running 17 to 22 inches, though not all the big ones are making it to hand. They’re stacked up behind spawning salmon, gorging on stray eggs. As Lefty Kreh famously said, “Salmon eggs to steelhead are like rolling a wine bottle into a jail cell.”
In my 35 years living here—and the many years before that when I’d drive up from the South Bay—I’ve never seen this many steelhead in the system. A strong salmon return on the Feather River has been a huge boost. If you didn’t know you were in California, you might mistake the Feather for a river in Alaska….sans bears!
The catch numbers per outing have been almost too high to post, but they’ve reminded me of what the fishing might have been many decades ago.
With a 10-foot 4-weight Sage One and 3X tippet, most fish can be tamed quickly. The larger ones will almost hit the backing on their first run but settle down soon after. An indicator with a two-egg setup has been the winning combination.
I took Matthew out for a quick one-hour session, and he hooked five and landed two. They were the smallest of the bunch, but it was his first time experiencing valley steelhead, and he was fired up afterward. We went back the next day, and he did even better—hooking eight and landing five.
The following week, Michael came home on break, and the three of us made the early-morning trek to the steelhead grounds. It was a huge success for them. I stayed on the bank, playing gilly and photographer. In an hour, they hooked 19 and landed 5. All the big ones got away.
With fishing this good, it was impossible to stop, so the next morning we got up even earlier and hiked back to the sacred spot. We had to wait 25 minutes for enough light to fish. This time I put the boys on stronger tippet and told them they could set harder and fight more aggressively. It paid off—Matthew landed two PBs, and Michael got his biggest as well.
It was so much fun fishing with the boys again. Those days feel few and far between. We wrapped up at 9:00 and headed to Nash’s in Chico for a great breakfast—a perfect end to a couple of memorable mornings with my two favorite fishing buddies.
On a solo morning, I hit the steelhead spot until 9:00 a.m., then headed for the Yuba. My good friend Kenny told me the dry-fly bite had been strong in the mornings. By the time I arrived at 10:00, the fish were already rising. For the next two hours, they ate small mayflies on top. With a 9ft 4-weight and a 20-foot leader with 5X tippet, I had 26 eats, hooked 14, and landed 8. The Yuba’s wild trout are absolute athletes. I was home by 2 p.m., finishing off an incredible day of steelhead and trout fishing.
