Had a blast catching my first decent sized steelhead (up to 15lbs) on jigs this past week. As a beginner I thought I'd pass along my comments and ask a couple of questions along the way.

1. Jig hooks: in general I was very disappointed in how poorly the hooks on steelhead jigs performed. Yes, lots of times they bent out on snags enabling me to save the jig but what use is it when the same hook straightens out under the pull of a strong fish in a good current? There wasn't one store-bought jig I had with me that didn't fail. I was particularly PO'ed when I broke the hook on the only marabou jig I owned in purple and green after nailing 33" and 35" bucks within 15 minutes of one another.

Send me an email if you want a list of the manufacturers whose jigs have weak hooks. I'd rather pay an extra $0.30 a jig for a strong hook even if I lose twice as many on snags. Anyone have any suggestions in the pre-tied category? Andy? Johnny C? Jigman?

[For people who tie their own, Offshore Angler (Bass Pro's saltwater arm) sells 1/8 oz plain jig heads with strong hooks. Gamakatsu and Kalin also sell plain heads with strong hooks. I use these in the salt with grubs and jerk baits.]

2. Dink floats can be cut down a lot: I found that the amount of lead needed to get the jig to the right depth was always a lot less than the amount of lead needed to balance even the skinny dink floats. As a result I did a lot of stream-side carving and reconfiguring. Please let me know if someone has a supplier of 4" and 6" skinny fixed dink floats that balance with 3 x #4 split shot or 2 x #3, plus a 1/8 oz jig. You need a pretty could reel to cast this light a contraption but the resulting set up had to be more sensitive than the more heavily weighted 'traditional' approach.

3. Jigs do work well on stale fish, but no miracles were observed. Most of the time we drift fished small gear. When the fish went off the bite and we could see a few out in the run that hadn't been hooked then the jig rod would come out. Several times I hooked fish -- a couple on a plain black jig (no eyes). Orange was an even better color.

A couple of other times we could see steelhead suspending between 1' and 11' deep in pools and even jigs drifted by their noses weren't enough to do the trick. Anyone have any other ideas for these type of switched-off fish?

4. Custom float rods are cumbersome to use in small drift boats. My 10 1/2' float rod worked great the 15% of the time I used it. The rest of the time I had to break it down to store it out of the way in the 14' drift boat we were rowing. This got old quickly, so I used a 9' light drift rod starting on Day 2. I couldn't keep as much line off the water but it was easier to use and that made it worthwhile.

5. Had problems feeding line into the drift off a baitcaster. I was using 10lb Maxima Green and Shimano Chronarch, but I imagine the problem was that the cut-down dink floats and the weights were too light to generate enough force to smoothly pull line off the spool. I ended up stripping line with my free hand and feeding it out before the current started dragging the float unnaturally. This approach often resulted in some slack line when setting the hook.

6. I can't figure out how to use a spinning reel and float jigs (unless I grow another arm). I had the bail open and line was feeding out smoothly but there would still be some small amount of slack between the reel and the index finger of my rod hand. A fish would hit, I'd clamp the line against the rod and set the hook. The fish would do one of several things, the worst being run right at me and the best running downstream so I could feed all the slack out under tension and flip the bail. Several fish didn't do a lot for the first few seconds, leaving my rod hand occupied pinching the line to maintain tension until my reel hand could put the slack line under tension and feed some of it through my fingers as the fish began to ran. That left me with an open bail and two occupied hands. I was trying to trip the bail by whacking the handle against my face. My fishing companions found this pretty funny. I also dropped about half the fish I hooked in this manner. I know I could allow some slack in the system by cranking the handle like crazy, but is that what everyone else does?

7. I hooked fish in surprisingly dead water. I thought the fish would all be in the softer cushion near current seams. Most were, but I hooked several in frog water out of the main current -- water so slow that the float barely moved. Got a couple more in back eddies. I'd read about this on the Board and in other publications but there's nothing like experiencing something first hand to sink a point home.

Having said all that I had a ball with the jigs -- watching that float sink and then seeing a silver snake start wriggling up near the surface is a great buzz. My thanks to the Board gurus for all their pre-trip advice.