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.”