Pere Marquette River · fly box
A national-forest river where fall steelhead run on autumn rain, not on a dam schedule.
| Pattern | Imitates | Size | Technique |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nuke Egg, orange | Steelhead egg | #12 | Dead drift under a float behind spawning gravel; do not fish over redds. |
| Hex Nymph | Hexagenia nymph | #8 | Late June after dusk on the sandy flats; a slow strip of 5 cm draws strikes. |
| Bead-head Stone | Stonefly nymph | #10 | Tight-line through the riffle heads in spring, before the steelhead arrive. |
| Black Woolly Bugger | Leech | #6 | Swing it through the deep bends for fall-run browns and drop-back steelhead. |
| Sucker Spawn, chartreuse | Sucker spawn | #10 | A spring standard; fish it 30 cm off the bottom in the tail of a pool. |
The dressing plate
On this river
Fishing the rise
Do not wait for the river to clear. Steelhead move on the rise, and the first six hours of colour are the most fishable. Use a float with a large egg pattern, fish the inside of bends where the current is broken, and expect the fish to be within three metres of the bank.
Spawning fish and ethics
From late October you will see fish on gravel. Leave them alone. Fish the water below the redds for drop-backs and the water above for travelling fish, and never wade across a redd — a single boot print can destroy a season's recruitment in a river this size.
Summer dry-fly on a steelhead river
In July the same water fishes as a small brown trout stream: Tricos at dawn, terrestrials in the afternoon. Use a 3-weight, a 4.5-metre leader and a #22 spinner, and treat the deeper bends as the places where the bigger resident fish live. This is the season to learn the river's structure without the pressure of a run.