I cast the Black and Chartreuse Marabou Spey across the pool, mended once, and let the fly swing across the tailout. I let it hang at the bottom of the swing for several seconds and was about to pick it up for another cast when my arm was jolted by a strike. A chrome-bright steelhead shot into the air and jumped wildly across the pool in its attempts to throw the fly.

I soon had the 8-pound hen at my feet, reached down and quickly released the barbless fly and let the fish swim back into the pool. It was an experience I could not have had years ago, when I first began fishing the Lake Erie tributaries, but I have been around long enough to see the development of an entire fishery.

Fishing on New York's Cattaraugus Creek in the early '70s was mainly for Chinook salmon, returns from a newly created program, and an occasional silver torpedo that some anglers called a 'steelhead.' They were naturally reproduced fish, lake-run steelhead with direct lineage to those stocked at the beginning of the century, and because the run consisted of only a handful of fish, hooking one was an event. Today during our fall runs an experienced steelheader can expect to land from six to eight fish on a good day.

Throughout the 1980s, the Cattaraugus benefited from steelhead stocking programs, but three steelhead hookups per day was considered good fishing for a fly rodder. A lot has changed since then: An aggressive stocking program adopted by Pennsylvania in the late '80s, combined with the consistent steelhead planting practices of New York and Ohio, has dramatically increased the number of steelhead returning annually to Lake Erie tributaries. The result has been a steelhead bonanza and an area that fishermen call 'Steelhead Alley.'

Creating Steelhead Alley
There are more than 40 rivers, streams, and small creeks that feed Lake Erie along the shorelines of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Virtually all them receive some returns of steelhead, either from direct stocking or from strays from other rivers, and I have fished or investigated nearly half of them. This experience leads me to believe that Steelhead Alley provides the best fly-fishing opportunity in the world today for a high number of steelhead hookups in a day of fishing.

Aggressive hatchery programs have come under attack in other parts of the country, especially where inferior hatchery fish have replaced native stocks. But in Lake Erie and its tributaries, a fishery has been created on many spate rivers that had neither the capability for natural reproduction because of their bedrock makeup, nor any other native gamefish inhabitants.


After years of hatchery-fish plantings, the states of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, have created the best (remaining) steelhead fishing in the world. Fly fishers are reaping the rewards.

Pennsylvania floods its small shoreline portion of Lake Erie with nearly one million smolts annually and has come under attack from some fisheries managers for such a disproportionate number in relation to its handful of streams. Admittedly, such stockings can create an unrealistic environment for steelhead fishing, but stocking large numbers hedges against high mortality in hatchery fish. And hatchery fish tend to stray from the river in which they were stocked, causing increased returns in neighboring New York and Ohio tributaries. The result has been unmatched opportunities for many anglers to fly fish successfully for steelhead.

Nearly a quarter of the rivers and streams of Steelhead Alley experience some natural reproduction. And in some cases the wild adult steelhead contribute significantly to the run. At least a half-dozen small tributaries of the Cattaraugus are producing significant wild steelhead smolts. A recent study on the Cattaraugus shows that as many as one-quarter of the adult fish returning in the fall of 1997 through the spring of 1998 were wild.

The western New York Chapter of Trout Unlimited, working in cooperation with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), in 1999 began its fifth year of the Cattaraugus Wild Steelhead Project, designed to study and analyze the wild steelhead potential of the watershed and to develop wild steelhead management practices, if they are feasible.