A salmon that has entered its home river to spawn has mostly stopped eating, and that can clue you in on where to fish. A trout picks its spot to balance shelter against a steady supply of drifting food, so reading trout water means reading the food lane. A migrating chinook or steelhead has no food lane to read. It is spending down a fixed reserve of fat with nothing coming in, so it sits wherever holding costs the least energy while still letting it move upstream when conditions allow. Learn to spot that low-cost water and you can walk up to an unfamiliar river knowing where the fish are holding and why.

From the Great Lakes tributaries that fill with chinook and coho around Labor Day to the coastal rivers of Oregon and Washington that take their fall runs from late summer into winter, the water-reading logic is the same. The fish are travelers, and your job is to find where they rest.