It’s rarely the fly when most first-timers on a fall salmon river lose fish. It’s usually the order of breaking strengths in the rig. Tie a leader that’s weaker than the fly line above it, hang your split shot below the hook, and you’ve built something that either breaks in the wrong place or won’t fish the water you’re standing in. A Chinook that runs 15 to 25 pounds, hooked in a river full of wood, will break a leader built backward. Before you think about egg patterns or bead colors, get the two rigs that matter right: the indicator leader for dead-drifting near the bottom, and the swing leader for a sunk fly on a tight line.

Those are the two methods you’ll use for Great Lakes kings and staging steelhead, and they require different leaders. The indicator rig is the one to learn first. It’s a floating presentation: a buoyant tapered leader off a floating line, a strike indicator or float, some split shot, a tippet ring, then tippet to the fly. You dead-drift it near the bottom, and it puts more fish on the bank than anything else in this fishery. The swing rig is a shorter, stouter leader off a sinking tip. You cast across the current, let the fly sink, and swing it on a tight line. It hooks fewer fish but the takes are worth the trade, and it’s more a steelhead method than a king method, though people do swing big flies on heavy tips for kings.