road time, river time, steelie time

Luke (my brother) made his annual pilgrimage this weekend to join me in a weekend of steelhead fishing. Saturday we fished the Kewaunee and had a couple runs to ourselves...for a brief time. We saw a few fish scooting around, but what was a river in prime form a couple weeks ago is now little more than a trickle. The water temp was around 52 degrees and slightly off-color. I haven't heard all the details, but I know there was a manure spill somewhere on the Kewaunee. Something like 100,000 gallons of manure leaked into the upper Kewaunee. DNR personnel and the farmers pumped out what they could and installed dams to stop the spread downriver. 250,000 trout and salmon were stocked into the river last week. Hopefully it doesn't spell the demise of those fish. We left early and headed up to the D.C. tribs. There is also very little water in the D.C. tribs and most of the fish are off the gravel. Suckers are starting to thin out as well. No fish on gravel means fewer fishermen. It also means drop-back fish. We saw a lot of nice fish, slightly colored up, heading back to the big pond. I hooked a nice hen that broke my tippet as I was tailing her and hooked another fish that went ballistic and broke me off in a heartbeat. We ended the day at the mouth of one of the rivers casting streamers into the lake...a last ditch effort to hook one more fish for the day. Today (Sunday), Luke and I headed down to the Milwaukee. We were the first ones there and had our choice of the runs. A couple bumps in the first two hours had me wondering if the front that dropped temps thirty degrees had shut the fish down. The water temp was around 50 and with the overcast skies, they should have been grabby. At about 9:30 I sent a cast to a long foamy slick behind a boulder and in an instant had a super-charged hen on. She spent more time out of the water than in it, tail-walking and jumping all over the place. We landed her, took a couple quick shots and pointed her back towards her lie. Awesome. Luke was still leading the run down and about a half-hour later, he was plowed and had a fish on that jumped a few times and then decided to fight like a smallmouth. This buck stuck his head down and refused to budge. I got down below Luke and tailed the fish, his first steelhead on a swung fly. I ended the day with an unexpected bonus fish, a 12 or 13 inch walleye on a swung fly. We were on the last run of the day and I was stripping in to re-cast when this ambitious little walleye hammered my string leech. I was so jacked that Luke got a fish that it made the drive much easier. Start looking at your calendar for next year, Luke. This is becoming a tradition that will yield some great memories.