Steelhead spawn in rivers from just upstream of tidewater to well toward the headwaters and in accessible reaches of tributary streams, large and small.

Back before steelhead managers knew all that much about steelhead life history and freshwater distribution, they often opened the lower portions of rivers to fishing, while keeping the upper portions closed. The hypothesis was that the steelhead run would be exposed to angling pressure for only the short time required to migrate through the lower river.

Unfortunately, that kind of management led to low fishing pressure on fish that rapidly migrated to the upper river and tributaries. However, the fish in the lower river, or bound for lower river tributaries (they usually hold in the river and migrate into small tributaries just before actually spawning) were exposed to fishing pressure from the time they entered the river until after they spawned and moved back downstream. The result could be under-fishing part of the population and severely over-fishing the lower river fish.

If you want to even the fishing pressure out on all parts of a steelhead population, I think you would have to limit the fishing just to the tidally affected reach. And that is the worst place for a CNR fishery. Those mint bright fish with the loose scales are the ones most subject to damage from handling. Scale loss leads to disease that leads to mortality. The exceptions are those steelhead that enter freshwater already colored up slightly. Their scales have "hardened" and become more firmly embedded. Steelhead and salmon that have colored up are much more resistant to rough handling. They also have a more developed protective slime layer, as well.

As for aggression and the likelihood of hitting your lure, sexual maturity plays a role, but I've only seen that in fish actually on spawning redds. They are very defensive and strike at pretty much anything. I found a large female chinook that had eaten a 5 inch fingerling once while doing spawning surveys.

Off the spawning redds, I think water temperatures play a big role in fish aggression. We often think native steelhead hit better than the early running hatchery fish. The reason might be that March and April water temperatures are often more favorable than those of December and January. I've had some incredibly aggresive hits from November hatchery steelhead, and I wonder if the slightly warmer water had anything to do with that.

The notion that fishing lower rivers is more conservation oriented than fishing upper rivers for steelhead is bunk. Managing overall mortality is the key to successful steelhead population management. Within the range of allowable mortality for a given population, it doesn't matter where in the river system - or the ocean for that matter - it occurs, and it doesn't matter what the cause, be it predation, flood, drought, hook and line, or gillnet. The dead fish don't spawn. Most of those that escape, do. That's the simple part of fish management.

Sincerely,

Salmo g.