A skated steelhead fly lives or dies on the wake it throws, not on how high it floats. That sounds like splitting hairs until you’ve watched a too-buoyant Bomber skitter across a glassy tailout and draw three slashing refusals from a fish that clearly wanted it — and couldn’t catch a fly riding on top of the film. Tie a waker that sits in the surface and pushes a steady, persistent “V”, and that same fish commits. Most tying advice has the priority backwards, and the cost of getting it wrong is the worst kind: fish that show themselves and then don’t stick.

Bill McMillan kept logs. After bringing roughly 2,000 steelhead to hand and writing down the conditions for each, he concluded in Dry Line Steelhead and Other Subjects (1987) that when water sits between 48 and 58°F, nothing moved more fish than a surface pattern swung on a floating line. That one temperature window is the entire reason the waking game exists. It’s also why a fly that holds its wake through the whole swing matters far more than which pattern is stamped on the bin label — the wake is the thing the fish answers, and a fly that quits waking halfway through the arc is fishing dead water.