Did we ever got lucky today 
A couple of months ago, I enrolled my Italian friends into Icefishing 101.
With a nice amount of rainfall during the week, I enrolled my Italian friend Andrea into Steelheading 101.
We started today in a tiny creek that I had not fished before...looking for some redhorse suckers.
We couldn't find much. There were some very wary white suckers. I got a small sucker on the first drift...but that was all that the creek gave up. After about 45 minutes, we decided to fish another creek.
A quick breakfast later, we arrived in creek #2 at 10:30am. Just as we got to the pool, someone was leaving. PERFECT!!!
Talk about getting lucky. In Ontario, many streams are packed with people during peak steelheading season...and finding an unoccupied pool is often very difficult after 9am.
The person said there were some people before him who got 5-6 steelheads early in the morning. He fished the pool after they left and only got one fish. The fish just shut down after 9am.
Well, it was a nice pool filled with fish, so Andrea and I gave it a shot.
Andrea and I started with nightcrawlers. After 15min of no action, I switched to some Gulp!. I few drifts later...BAM!
It was a spunky fish that gave it all. At the end, it didn't revive...so I took the fish home for dinner.
Andrea switched over to Gulp! as well...but we didn't get other bites. So I swtiched back to nightcrawlers. A few drift later, BAM! It was a small white sucker. I handed the rod over to Andrea for a little fight and some pictures. To Andrea, the fish reminded him of barbels in Italy.
Another worm on the hook...a few drifts later...BAM again! This one jumped...and I know what it is...steelhead!!!
I handed the rod over to Andrea and the fish gave him a nice fight with multiple jumps. We got him in the net though. We shared the catch
And Andrea said he wanted some rainbow trout...so we kept this one too.
Up to now, Andrea had yet to hook up. I gave him a little instruction on drifting by using the rod to hold the float back a bit, slowing the drift down and allowing the fish to see the baited hook first. He worked at it a bit while I handed a couple more white suckers. Finally, BAM! for Andrea! He landed a nice white sucker.
We got into a little activity of white suckers and caught 8 of them in a hurry. Both Andrea and I were hooking up on them every other drift
Here's a picture for my fish list
Then, Andrea had a good hit right by a log jam. It jumped and gleam silver all over. First 100% personal effort steelhead for Andrea!
We played with a couple more white suckers...then Andrea hooked up to his second steelhead! This one was a clone of the one previous. We released it without even a picture.
At about 1:30pm, it was all quiet. I switched to Gulp! again, then pink roe bag, then back to nightcrawler. All of a sudden, a nice steelhead came up to grab some bugs on the surface. I pegged the spot where the fish rose. Two drifts later, BAM! The big steelhead slammed my float down. I had the fish on for about 20 seconds and the hook came out. DARN! It was a definite double digit steelhead and would be PB. Oh well...can't win them all.
To end the day, we hit one more white sucker. At 2:15pm, I snagged on the log jam and lost my entire rig including the float.
We were planning to leave at 2pm and the fishing was slow anyways...so we called it a day.
Andrea had a lot of fun and so did I. When the water warms up some more, we'll go toss some caddis for some small stream brookies and/or chum up some carp at the Islands
Thanks for reading
Illegitimus Non Carborundum