late fall coho on the oak creek (south milwaukee, wi)

I had made plans to fish on Saturday with Neal and our new fishing buddy Damien. We made plans to head up to Oak Creek for a morning chasing coho. The flow were almost nothing but Damien was sure there were still some fish holding in the deeper pools.

Friday was my daughters birthday and we went out for dinner with some family and friends after work. After the kids went to bed I had time enough to tie some streamers for Saturdays fishing trip. I got maybe a half dozen finished before the clock reached 11:00pm, I decided to call it quits and head for bed.

Saturday morning was freezing cold and the temperature gauge in the car read a frosty 27 degrees as I pointed the car north on the expressway towards the dairy land. We met at 7:00am and the sun was just barely coming up over Lake Michigan. We fished our way up the one of the more famous bends sighting a few fish along the way. The fish, just as Damien had said, were all hunkered down in the deepest pools. That’s where we focused our effort because every shallow run and riffle only held inches of water.

Fishing with almost no flow is different the relying on the current to impart the action on your fly. We were making short cast to the opposite sides of the bank and relying on stripping and jigging to bring the fly back to us. Neal and I quickly found out that Damien had no problems enticing fish like that because he was the only one to hook or land anything. He hooked a nice female from the deepest section of the pool, and sniped a small male from a section of water in-between a log jam.

our new fishing friend with a female coho

Early in the morning we had multiple fish that were turning on our flies and some that were actually following them out of the deeper pools. The fish lost interest in our flies mid-morning and that was it for the action today. Stayed till almost 1:00pm and headed for home. I’m sure that we are destined to see some fresh steelhead moving up any time now we just need a spike in the flows to facilitate that. Until the next major rain I expect fishing to remain slow.