Ironclad Rules For Winter Steelheading People Who Deliberately Stand In Icy Water Need Some Guidance

Steelheaders question their sanity more often than sharpen their hooks. To those of you about to steelhead, we salute you. We also warn you. Taking those first tentative steps into the icy water can lead you down a path where the destination is always shrouded in fog, but the rites of passage are painfully clear.

Ponder, if you will, the 10 Irrefutable Rules of Winter Steelheading:

1. Rivers will rise and become unfishable in direct correlation to days off work.

2. Fish will bite on eggs only when you run out of eggs.

When your freezer is well-stocked with plump, perfectly cured salmon egg clusters, you can bounce a fist-sized clump of them off the nose of a large steelhead with no visible result. This will continue until the day you run out, at which point record steelhead will swim up your driveway, through your front door, taking your dog hostage and demanding fresh salmon eggs.

3. Your yarn will always be the wrong color.

Any good steelheader knows that because some guy caught a big steelhead in 1973 with a hook festooned with Exorcist-green yarn, fluorescent fuzz is an absolute necessity to hook a fish. On any given day, steelhead will be biting not only on a color of yarn that you didn’t bring, but on yarn very similar to that on a 12-foot-long afghan you hauled to the dump just last week.

4. Your hooks are always too big.

You will deduce this after standing in subzero weather for six or eight weeks without a single strike. You then will switch to a smaller hook, then smaller, then smaller yet, until finally a large steelhead takes your bait and immediately swims free.

5. Stumps, waterlogged trees and other snags will maneuver into position to accept your hooks.

Like hippos, they’re amazingly agile underwater.

6. The drift is always better on the other side of the river.

See below.

7. You can never get to the other side of the river.

See above.

8. Protective gear isn’t.

Fishing hats, whether cheap, Uncle Bud’s Catfish baseball caps or $45 Outdoor Research Gore-Tex abominations, are carefully designed to funnel excess rainfall directly down the center of your back.

Leaks in waders will always appear near the top, above your waist, allowing for a long, slow, torturous journey to a final resting pool in your boot.

9. Bait boxes are invaluable.

These handy plastic containers, which attach around your waist with a web belt, protect shrimp, cluster eggs and other aromatic offerings all day long, ensuring they will be fresh and pungent for their guaranteed spill on the carpet of the $33,000 Suburban on the way home.

10. Steelheaders always exaggerate, making their plight sound at least 19 times worse than it is.

See you on the river.