I returned yesterday from 8 days on the Situk, the same river you fished (I believe). We did well on fresh fish using very small (dime-sized) multi-colored yarn balls. For bright fish, we used more blue (didn't have purple) plus the usual array of cerise, salmon, chartreuse and orange. In the latest Wild Salmon and Steelhead Dec Hogan writes about purple and blue flies imitating the squid and/ or prawns steelhead were feeding on prior to ascending the river so this gave us greater confidence.

However, I'd be exaggerating if I said that blue yarn was the magic bullet. My buddy and I did a whole lot of sight casting to pods of ghosts and most of the time we were drifting right by their noses with no result. Every 10-20 casts one of the ghosts would suck down the fly and we'd be off to the races.

There was a lively debate with one of our guides as to whether we would do better with these fish using less weight and casting more upstream to get a more a more natural drift down through the fish or to go with more weight and use the classic across-and-down swing. We certainly missed detecting more bites with the 'up and down' approach but we felt we got more more bites, too, and we were able to present effectively to unspooked fish that were cruising parallel to our boat. The alternative swing presentation required us to row back upstream and guesstimate where the fish were before swinging across the pod.