The steelhead are approaching. If my name was tattoo and I was on Fantasy Island, I would be saying "dah plane, dah plane, dah plane". Ok.. If you are too young to remember Fantasy Island, I will explain.

The plane is landing.. The fish are arriving.

If you are fortunate to be fishing between Bonneville Dam and John Day Dam, they are counting over 4000 steelhead daily. The Mcnary Dam area is seeing over 1400 steelhead daily. This is positive information, no matter what your magic fish count number may be.

Get that rod ready to go!

I'm hoping our counts up north are high enough to open the Methow. There was an article in the Wenatchee World newspaper about the improving prospects of opening the Wenatchee. It may not happen this year, but hopefully it will soon. That will help alleviate some pressure on the Methow.

Steelheading has actually been pretty good for us this summer. We've caught fish each time we've gone down to lower tribs like Drano and Underwood, and I'm even hearing of a few caught already at McNary and Port Kelly. The river temps are a bit cooler and water levels a bit higher than usual so I think there are a few more fish than usual coming straight up river (which makes the tribs a little less predictable than usual).

What I'm really looking for is the salmon counts... they finally started to jump a bit at Bonneville with over 2K yesterday, so hopefully they're on the way.

Starfish--from what I've heard you're doing much better than most. I made a trip to Drano in mid July and picked up one nice fish, but got blanked in mid august--along with most of the other hundreds of folks on the water. There was an occasional fish on, and even occasionally a boat that seemed to have the hot spot for an hour or so with 2 or 3 fish, but I didn't witness any of the "hot bites" that I've seen in year's past with nets flying all over the place. I've also heard that the scene on the OR side at Herman, Tanner, and Eagle creeks have been a real bust. The bright side is that since the dam counts are good, that means more fish for upstream for us!

I've been itching to get out at McNary for some evening/night/morning trolling--what's the best technique to entice a bite given the warm water? What depth do they run at this time of year?

E-mann

You're definitely right that there weren't any hot bites, but we managed to scratch out enough fish to be happy every trip. Last time we took my eleven year old son and my buddy's eleven-year-old and each of the boys caught two or three fish.

The few McNary reports I've heard so far were mostly bobber reports, running pretty shallow (7 ft) with bare shrimp. I did hear of a couple trolled steelhead caught on a hot lips. I don't usually try much at McNary until the water cools off but there are definitely some fish moving through there. I'm going after walleyes tonight in the moonlight instead.

Well good job getting the kids into some fish. I think my kids believe the elusive steelhead is a little like bigfoot--mostly folklore with the occasional reported sighting. I gotta get them into some more fish to restore the faith...

The moon was crazy bright last night. Good luck tonight on those 'eyes.

I was down at McNary on Saturday, the 25th. Had two hookups on lighted Mag Wiggle Warts. Lost one and got one keeper to the boat. Both after dark... Seems like the fishery might be be a good option pretty soon, especially considering the fact that it's half the drive and half as many people as Drano...

Thanks for the report, Schleg. My thought exactly!

Cool-- glad to hear there's already a night bite!

The walleyes were OK last night, not red hot but we got six keepers. I did have a funny catch... first I caught a shad on a big Rapala Taildancer plug, then a couple hundred yards later I landed a double on shad-- one on each hook of the plug. Weird.

Just an update of numbers for steelhead counts. This report comes from
www.fpc.org/currentdai...adults.htm

John Day- 1540 with 282 being wild
McNary- 3481 with 603 being eild
Ice Harbor- 2352 with 396 being wild

Or you can just click the link on the left side of the page under web. There is a link called "Fish Counts".

Thanks for pointing that out glock, didnt look good enough....

I actually added it after you put up the link. I have been "meaning" to get around to that

Nothing like a lil reminder.