3 days of fly fishing Lake Erie tributaries for steelhead and trout!
Lake Erie Steelhead fishing is a unique experience. Hundreds of fish ranging from 18 to 30+ inches attempting to spawn up small creeks while dozens of anglers do their best to catch them. It’s a man made fishery that is about as cool and unique as any I’ve fished and is the source of as much online bickering as I’ve ever seen. In this video I spent 3 days fly fishing Lake Erie tributaries with 2 friends of mine, James and Micah, to see what kind of fish we could get into. And I got lucky and caught my biggest fish of the year… Welcome back to another video.
So as you can see my buddies weren’t too confident about catching any Erie steel, but that didn’t take long to change.
Somehow James managed to hook a fish on the first cast of the day, which may or may not have been bad luck, but you’ll see that unfold as the video progresses. We continued fishing for a bit longer and I finally managed to hook into a fish.
That was a heck of a way to start out the trip, but after fishing that creek a little bit longer and running into numerous people we decided to start hopping from creek to creek looking for less people and more fish… a combination we realized was rare.
After fishing a total of 6 different creeks, 4 of which were total busts, we headed to arguably the most popular creek in the area. Popular creeks are annoying because they’re usually arguable the best creeks, but because of their popularity the fishing can be very annoying. But we were able to find a hole that didn’t have anyone fishing it and set up shop. The issue was because the water was dirty we were fishing blind, and without knowing where the fish usually sat in this creek we had to figure it out as we went.
And with that fish we concluded day 1. We felt like we had found a pattern at the end of the day, the issue is that creek gets fished so much we knew that trying to fight our way there in the morning would be a mistake. So instead we started out fishing a few other creeks with the goal of getting my buddy Micah on his first ever steelhead since he had been skunked on day 1. But first, we started off the day with a surprise catch.
After that random brown trout catch we decided to switch creeks since we hadn’t seen many steelhead up to that point. And finally I stumbled across the mother load.
With Micah on the board we had all caught a fish and were all riding a high. James and I then both caught a fish of our own, but both were foul hooked so I don’t want to make a big deal out of them. Foul hooking these fish is somewhat common, even when throwing flies under indicators, because there are so many fish you’re drifting by that eventually one of the fish get foul hooked. I know if you’ve never done this that may sound suspicious, but I promise if you fish for Erie steelhead it will happen. It can be a fun fight, but I didn’t really want to count them as catches so I’ve kept them out of the video up to this point. But after a full day of pretty much getting our butts kicked with the exception of Micah’s fish, we decided to go back and fish the same stretch of water I had caught 2 steelhead at the evening prior to see if we could find a few more fish to end our day.
We taped that fish at a tad over 29 inches, which makes it my biggest fish of the year. And honestly, for Erie, a really nice steelhead. After that fish it got dark on us and we called it. Which meant 2 days were down, the first being far better than the second, but both being better than the entire trip I had made in January. This left us with one more day, and honestly we didn’t even have a full day but we were determined to make the most of it.
So I’m not going to lie the GoPro died right here because I wasn’t paying attention to how much battery I had left. But luckily Micah filmed some for me on his iPhone so I could show the fish off to you guys. This is what happens when you’re more focused on enjoying a trip with your buddies and less about filming a video, but that’s what it’s all about. James also ended up catching another steelhead in the same exact spot I caught mine, which seemed like a perfect way to end off the adventure. Overall this trip was a blast, and although we had some rough patches of fishing I wouldn’t trade time spent on the water with my friends for anything. If you want to see more tips with these goofy guys then share the video around and we’ll make sure to do some more trips in the future.. and as always, thanks for watching.
