Steelhead: Skating Flies and Pounding Hearts

New West‘s Bill Schneider takes a sojourn to Oregon’s Grande Ronde and finds steelhead doing the thing that makes fly fishers’ hearts pound: taking skated dry flies. “This means using a huge fly, extensively doped with floatant, cast roughly at a 45 degree angle downstream and then skated back toward shore until directly downstream. Instead of trying to leave no wake, you want the largest wake possible

, which is why they call it either waking or skating your fly.”