Flies in Focus: Great Lakes Steelhead Streamers

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Over 4,500 miles of tributary-riddled shoreline ring the Great Lakes, forming one of the world’s most diverse and expansive fisheries. Angling opportunities abound throughout the entire calendar year, headlined by the migratory rainbow trout, called Great Lakes steelhead, that run between September and May. These "salt-free" steelhead readily eat well-presented streamers even in the coldest months, supporting an ever-growing population of streamer junkies and two-hand-fly-fishing enthusiasts who gladly sacrifice numbers to grind out savage strikes from the most aggressive fish in the system. Swing anglers embrace this challenge and those who strip flies take it to a whole new level. These steelhead don’t live in the salt, but they’re plentiful, grow large, run fast, and crush flies.

Regional Influence

Swinging streamers for Great Lakes migratory species began in the mid-1980s, gained traction in the 1990s and boomed in popularity over the last 20 years. The Midwest is positively loaded with innovative anglers and tiers who have spent decades on the water, developing region-specific patterns that often diverge from traditional styles in both design and appearance to meet the unique and diverse needs of these waters. Influential Midwestern anglers like Wisconsin’s Dave Pinczkowski, Michigan’s Kevin Feenstra, Pete Humphreys, and Jeff Hubbard, Ohio’s Jerry Darkes and Jeff Liskay, Pennsylvania’s Greg Senyo, Karl Weixlmann, and John Nagy, and New York’s Rick Kustich and Nick Pionessa have all shaped the techniques and flies that have become mainstays in boxes across the Great Lakes and beyond. Their revolutionary and reliable patterns, in addition to developments in gear and the ever-increasing accessibility of information, have driven Spey fishing from the fringes into the mainstream.

Swing Fly Configurations for Great Lakes Steelhead Streamers

Most modern swing flies are tied on shanks or tubes to accommodate short, octopus-style hooks at the fly’s rear, helping to stick short-strikers that pluck at tails instead of fully committing. Short hooks are also tougher for fish to throw, typically boosting landing percentages for anglers. Both shanks and tubes present their own sets of tactical benefits, prompting most anglers to carry an assortment of each to ensure flexibility on the water.

Available in plastic, aluminum, brass, and copper, tubes can minimize damage to flies, sliding away from hooked fish. They also allow anglers to set the hook at any desired distance behind the fly. Metal tubes offer increased durability and excel in deep water. Plastic tubes crack after some use but allow tiers to create neutrally-buoyant flies that can hover and dance in very slow current without hanging up–an incredibly useful attribute in cold-water conditions. Shanks generally run between 25 and 55mm in length, with loops of heavy braid or wire added to secure trailer hooks. They more readily accept dumbbell eyes, bead chain, and lead wire, and remain highly durable options.

Swing Fly Design for Great Lakes Steelhead Streamers

Swing flies are built to undulate and swim in current, a key for eliciting strikes in the general absence of angler-imparted action. Thus, natural materials like marabou, rabbit, pine squirrel, Arctic fox, finn raccoon, guinea, Lady Amherst, and schlappen regularly appear as tail, wing, and prop materials in Great Lakes streamers.

Synthetic products like brushes, dubbing, chenilles, and flash materials like Flashabou, Mirror Flash, and Kreelex have also become staple ingredients for their ability to shed water, add bulk to bodies and heads, and attract sub-surface attention. It’s no secret that these steelhead love flash, and it appears in just about every steelhead fly in some capacity. Kevin Feenstra’s Flash Mob is almost solely constructed of assorted flash materials propped with schlappen. Gaudy flies like this one tend to do well in the fall, when water can be warmer and a bit more tannic. They also stand out in stained water.

It would be negligent not to mention Senyo here, who in partnership with Hareline Dubbin, has created lines of synthetic materials, shanks, and wire that have infiltrated every corner of the Great Lakes fly tying landscape across just about all species. Products like Ice Dub, Laser Dub, Predator Wrap, Aqua Veil, and Chromatic Brushes are epic materials that pop up in all sorts of recipes for their quality, versatility, and durability. Senyo’s fly designs are also hard to beat, with his Artificial Intelligence, Egg Raider, and Intruder variations occupying shop bins and fly boxes throughout the Midwest and beyond.

Weight for Great Lakes Steelhead Streamers

Both weighted and unweighted flies catch fish in these tributaries, and it’s the piece of water you're standing in that dictates which you should deploy. Weighted flies provide increased depth control, making them well-suited to rivers with ledgy, shale bottoms. Simply raising and lowering the rod tip for instance, can drop a heavy fly into buckets and off ledges, where these fish love to lay in ambush. The added weight, in conjunction with assorted sink tips, also gains depth more quickly, which is critical in fast water. A great winter tactic involves fishing a heavy fly on a monofilament leader. The fly’s weight gets it down, and the monfilament’s smaller diameter catches less current, allowing for a low and slow presentation.

Weightless flies, on the other hand, rely on sink tips to tow them through wide swaths of water at a relatively constant depth, covering shallow or uniform runs. Leader length often ranges from 8 feet down to 12 inches, with shorter lengths tethering flies closer to the sink tip, providing greater depth control.  Manipulating the fly’s depth via slack management and rod-tip positioning is still possible here, but vertical displacement is more muted than it is with heavier flies. Unweighted flies also provide some flexibility in that split shot can always be added to the leader if we need to get them deeper.

Color Schemes for Great Lakes Steelhead Streamers

If you ask 10 experienced anglers to name their favorite color schemes, you’d likely get 10 different answers. This comes as no surprise given how unique each river system can be. Imitative patterns seek to “match the hatch,” incorporating realistic profiles and tones of common prey items like emerald shiners, alewives, sculpins, gobies, darters, crayfish, and smelt. These flies excel in clear water and tend to include subtle flash and mottled, earthy tones like olive, tan, dark brown, silver, pale blue, and grey. Kevin Feenstra’s Winter Code Breaker is a shiner imitation of pearl and pale blue that excels on Lake Michigan tributaries where forage is plentiful. Feenstra’s Grapefruit Head Leech is another well-known pattern that has done well for me on Lake Erie tributaries over the years.

Attractor patterns, on the other hand, tend to size up and ditch the earth tones for bright or fluorescent colors with lots of contrast. Most of the streams that line Lake Erie’s southern shoreline are spate (rain-fed and prone to flow surges and drops) rivers, with flows and clarities fluctuating drastically mirroring precipitation. Fishing Ohio’s Rocky, Chagrin, or Grand Rivers, for instance, often requires these attractor-style patterns to combat the often-poor water clarity, which is considered favorable when it exceeds 16 inches.

In these tough conditions we adhere to the old saying, “any publicity is good publicity,” and build-in specific elements to get flies noticed. Opting for bulkier patterns like rabbit-strip leeches and Intruders with base colors of orange, black, purple, or blue and ample flash helps draw attention in stained water. Don’t be afraid to run flies in the 5- to 6-inch-range when visibility is low. These fish are predators, and under the right conditions they’ll hit bigger offerings without hesitation. Jeff Hubbard’s Miserable Magnet perfectly fits this description, with a rabbit-strip tail, flash, and a bulky, water-pushing head. This fly, tied in chartreuse over purple with copper flash tends to work in just about any water conditions. Other great combinations include black over orange, and flame orange over purple.

Incorporating contrast can be equally if not more important to positive outcomes than the colors themselves. Ohio’s Jeff Liskay, one of the region’s most prominent and influential anglers, has developed an arsenal of flies that consistently net fish in Ohio and western Pennsylvania. Many of his patterns incorporate contrast via Ice Dub or Laser Dub heads over darker bodies. Two of his flies, the Hot-Head Triple Tail and the Flame Thrower, stand out for their simplicity and consistency.

Stripping Streamers for Great Lakes Steelhead

Stripping flies on single-hand setups is also an effective, albeit largely underutilized method of catching steelhead that can help deliver and animate flies in areas like eddies and around laydowns where swung flies struggle to operate. It can also be done to great effect in the main lakes themselves, namely around river mouths in the fall when staging fish roam the shallows. Small emerald shiner patterns are consistent producers from beaches and break walls.

Stripping is most effective when water temperatures are on the warmer side–ideally around 50 degrees–but it can also be very good when colder water temps spike a few degrees in a short period of time. September, October, and early November are prime months to strip flies as fresh fish, still in “lake-mode,” will aggressively chase bait imitations. Having just entered the stream, these chromers retain all of their open water attributes and put up acrobatic fights when hooked. Stripping flies is also highly productive in the late spring, when fish feed voraciously as they drop back toward the lake following spawning activity.

Stripped Flies for Great Lakes Steelhead

A wide variety of flies, both single-hook and articulated, work well with hooks generally in sizes two to six. Simple patterns like Pinczkowski’s Bad Hair Day, Weixlmann’s Little Precious, or even tried-and-true Woolly Buggers and rabbit-strip Zonkers are excellent choices when tied in white, olive, black, or chartreuse and fished on intermediate or sink-tip lines. The main characteristic you’ll want to look for is a hook that’s placed in the rear third of the fly. Just like swing flies, 3- or 4-inch patterns with hooks up front will miss some fish.

Crayfish imitations are also powerful tools for streamer anglers in the fall and spring. Early in my steelheading journey I witnessed a fish launch from the shadows to annihilate a Rebel Craw crankbait. From that point on I’ve carried a couple crayfish flies with me. The EZ-Craw, designed by Darkes, a long-time guide, fly designer, author, and Great Lakes fly fishing pioneer, is a small, single-hook crayfish pattern that can be deadly when skittered and popped along the bottom. Darkes and I have had days on the water when we almost couldn't keep a variety of species off this fly. It shines brightest, in my experience, when swung through the shallow heads of runs in the spring. Smallmouth bass, steelhead, freshwater drum, quillback, redhorse suckers, and carp have all eaten this fly for me at some point, and it's always in my box–especially in March and April.

Sculpin imitations like Darkes’ Red Eyed Sculpin and Feenstra’s Toad Breaker also provide versatility in the spring, tempting both steelhead and lake-run smallmouth bass that share runs and feed heavily on the teardrop-shaped baitfish. Executing a dual-pronged approach of stripping flies through eddies, along current seams, and around laydowns in addition to swinging them through juicy tailouts and buckets is an excellent way to target both species in the spring. Russ Maddin’s Circus Peanut, Chromatic Nut, and Flash Monkey, and Tommy Lynch’s Drunk and Disorderly are highly effective streamers that were purpose-built in Michigan for large trout, salmon, and steelhead. The Mini Swinging D and Swinging D 2.0, designed by Michigan’s Mike Schultz, are smallmouth flies that also do very well for steelhead, especially in the spring.

Fish It Hard

The sheer number of Great Lakes steelhead in these streams allows us to pursue them in a wide variety of ways. It’s all about finding the method we like best and enjoying these time on the water. Swinging and stripping flies provides anglers with an interesting challenge that can sometimes also open up water and provide solitude. They’re more active methods of fishing that many find enjoyable, and as long as the fish can see the fly, we are in the game. There are so many incredible patterns out there to choose from, and they can all work when properly presented. When in doubt, tie on a fly that you have confidence in, fish it hard, and hold on tight.

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Matt Redmond is an avid fly angler and tier based in northeast Ohio. He enjoys exploring the Great Lakes and their connecting waters, with a special interest in smallmouth bass, steelhead, and freshwater drum.

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