10 painful lessons I learned on my first B.C. steelhead trip

#1 Steelheading is high risk, high reward

Just before arriving in B.C., I’d been enjoying a few weeks of excellent perch fishing on southern Ontario’s Lake Simcoe, where a slow afternoon meant catching 20 jumbos. So I was a little spoiled by the steady action. The Gold River’s 100 per cent genetically wild steelhead are notoriously big and strong (above), but the measure of a good day, I soon learned, is just one fish. Catching two would make for a tremendous day, and six would be the day of a lifetime. However if you do hook one, what a fish it will be—up to 25 pounds of fresh chrome rocketing and leaping across the swift, treacherous river. And the flipside to these low catch numbers is that as long as you fished well, posting a zero does not carry the same stench of skunk as it would if you were fishing for, say, bass.