steelheader (CA)

 Local Sports
British Columbia: awesome fishing
Outdoors By: J.D. Richey
Friday, April 15, 2005 10:04 AM PDT


Forget Alaska. When it comes to taking the fishing trip of a lifetime, British Columbia can't be topped. BC is a lot less crowded, the scenery is immense and spectacular, and the fish are amazing.

I just got back from my third trip up there in the past calendar year and I get more and more enamored by the place each time.

This trip, I fished near the town of Terrace in the waters of the Skeena River drainage - which harbor the largest salmon and steelhead on the planet. Eighty-pound Chinook salmon are not out of the question along the Skeena and in some of her tributaries, and 30-pound steelhead are caught most years as well.

The first week of April is just the beginning of the steelhead run in that neck of the world and planning a trip at that time is a bit of a gamble. I've been there when the steelies were absolutely thick in all the rivers and, then there are years like this one. We arrived right in the middle of a freak winter-like storm that carried with it 40 mile-per-hour winds and snow.

As a masochistic steelhead junkie, bad weather doesn't concern me much. The problem last week, however, was that the cold weather turned the rivers into frigid trickles. With extremely low water that was anywhere from 35 to 37 degrees, the steelhead just didn't have a whole lot of incentive to run up out of the saltwater. We were in desperate need of rain and the forecast didn't look good.

Despite the gloom and doom, my buddy Fred Contaoi, his dad Fred Sr. and I went right out and hooked over 30 steelhead on our first afternoon! Welcome to BC! The fishing was so hot that we only worked about three pools in a 1/8-mile stretch of river before calling it a day.

The steelies, which were anywhere from nine to 16 pounds and less than a mile from saltwater, were suckers for big, gaudy Glo Bugs fished dead-drift style under indicators. We also caught some on spinning gear with orange yarn ("wool," as the Canadians call it) suspended a couple feet below balsa floats.

The place was absolutely stacked with steelhead and nobody else was fishing it. Very cool! The rest of the trip we sampled some of the other (countless) rivers in the area and found some terrific steelies in the most awe-inspiring settings you could imagine. We didn't tie into anything huge by BC standards - you have to get up over 25 pounds before the people in those parts bat an eye - but who can complain about good numbers of steelhead in the low to middle teens? Certainly not I.

When you're up there, one's sense of reality gets distorted very quickly. One day, I hooked about a 15-inch steelhead that our guide called a "smolt." I didn't have the heart to tell him that on the Yuba River back home that same fish would be considered a typical adult steelie. We also caught some beautiful dolly varden and sea-run cutthroat trout to three pounds in several of the rivers.

Down here, you'd have 100 guys on the bank vying for a shot at such nice fish, but up there, the locals got about as excited about the trout as we do about squawfish.

Perhaps the greatest aspect of fishing in the northwestern portion of BC is the fact that there are more rivers than people. You could spend 20 lifetimes exploring all the salmon and steelhead waters and never scratch the surface...all the while having most of it to yourself.

We never even got down to the nearby saltwater, where huge kings were on a tear and big Pacific halibut were reportedly in water as shallow as 30 feet while we were there. The entire summer is hot for ocean kings and coho and assorted bottomfish, and the rivers really come alive about the second week of April with good pushes of steelies.

By June, gigantic kings flood the rivers, and July and August produce non-stop action for silvers, chums, pinks and steelhead. Things up around the Skeena roll right along through the fall as well and the season finishes off in October with some awesome steelie and coho action.

For more info, contact Gill McKean at West Coast Fishing Adventures in Terrace, BC. He can be reached at (866) 578-8552 or on the net at