The Great Steel Rush

It looked like a scene from the Great Gold Rush. There they stood, rank upon frozen rank, along the icy river banks, occasionally stumbling back to toast numbed fingers over blazing fires in the zero-degree cold. Every motel for miles around was full. The ground was littered with empty bourbon bottles, bean cans, and instant-coffee jars. Signs warned: PROTECT YOUR ACCESS TO THE RIVER, and a productive "beat" (60 ft. of river frontage) sold for $5,000. But the only gold around was in somebody's teeth. The hardy types who lined the banks of the Skagit and a hundred other rivers in Washington state last week were fishing. For trout. In the winter, no less.

Screwy people. Screwy fish. The steelhead trout is the oddball of the Salmo family. It starts out life as a plain old rainbow trout. But then, for some curious reason that nobody has ever figured out, it suddenly gets itchy fins and migrates from its fresh-water birthplace down the rivers and out to sea. Its color changes from a bluish hue to steely silver (hence its name), its quarter-sized spots shrink to freckles, and it grows enormous for a trout: an average steelhead weighs 8 Ibs. (v. 1 1/2 Ibs. for a rainbow), and big ones run 30 Ibs. or more.

Finally, after two years of gallivanting around, the steelhead comes home to spawn. It even does that the hard way. Salmon spawn in October; rainbow trout lay their eggs in the fall and hibernate sluggishly on the bottom at the first cold snap. But winter-from

December to March-is the steelie's time to swing.

Please Pass the Hardware. If a steelhead is an icthyologist's problem, it is also a fisherman's passion. Ordinary rainbows generally eat flies; the steelie -assuming it is in the mood-eats hardware: spoons, wobblers, plugs, strings of red beads, or just about anything else an imaginative fisherman happens to tie to his hook. It does not rise to the lure like a finicky rainbow, it attacks it enthusiastically-so hard that the pole may literally be torn from an unwary angler's grasp.

At the first touch of the hook, enraged steelies will "tail-walk" like marlin, leap like tarpon 5 ft. above the water, run like bonefish-stripping 150 yds. of line off a screaming reel in one lightning burst. They have even been known to rush a boat and leap over the fisherman's head in a frantic effort to escape. The battle may last anywhere from 15 min. to an hour-and steelies get more tricky as they tire. Then they will bulldog to the river bottom and jam their heads in the gravel until the hook rubs out or the line is chaffed.

Experienced fishermen count themselves lucky to land one out of every four steelies they hook. They will spend every winter weekend in a boat or camped on some cheerless river bank in hopes of netting one or two fish. In the old days, they sometimes went all season long without a catch. So popular was the steelhead that there were five fishermen for every fish until Biologist Clarence Pautzke, 57, now chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, hit on a new way to restock Washington's rivers. Instead of dumping 1-in. or 2-in. steelhead fry directly into the streams, where most of them perished before they got big enough to migrate, Pautzke started raising them in hatching pools, turning them loose only when they reached migrating size: 7 in. to 11 in. long.

With Tomatoes & Bacon. Today, Washington game officials plant 350,000 steelhead each year in Barnaby Slough, a well-hidden pool 50 miles up the Skagit from Puget Sound. Protected by wardens with shotguns from natural predators (mink, otter, kingfishers, mergansers), fattened on fish meal, they are released at the age of a year. The results are astonishing. This year, Washington fishermen will catch upwards of 225,000 steelheads compared to 130,000 in 1955.

Brillat-Savarin should have eaten so well. As a table fish, the steelhead offers the best of both its worlds: its flesh has the pink color and high fat content of a saltwater salmon, the delicacy and firmness of a fresh-water trout. Stuffed with onion, lined with bacon strips, drenched in tomato sauce, wrapped in foil and roasted over an open fire, the steelie is enough to make a gourmand out of a gourmet. But it is the sport, not the stomach, that makes a steelhead fisherman. Snorts one oldtimer: "Catching a steelhead for food is like visiting the Louvre to go to the men's room."

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