S4, Ep 124: STEELHEAD REDUX: All Things Steelhead Alley with Jeff Blood (Part One)

Marvin Cash: Hey, folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Articulate Fly. On this episode, I'm joined by Steelhead Alley OG Jeff Blood. We take a deep dive into all things Steelhead Alley, the fishery, the gear, the tactics, and everything in between. I think you're really going to enjoy this one, but before we get to the interview, just a couple of housekeeping items.

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Well, Jeff, welcome to The Articulate Fly.

Jeff Blood: Well, thanks for the invitation. I'm glad to catch up with you and talk again.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, absolutely. I don't know that either of us want to confess how long it's been since we met each other.

Jeff Blood: Well, it's been a while back. We were on Cattaraugus Creek. I remember watching you and a couple of your fishing buddies. That's a lot of fish. Yeah, big steelhead.

Marvin Cash: I remember that. I also remember skating around a fair amount on that shale, too, because I didn't have studs in my boots.

Jeff Blood: Lesson learned, right?

Marvin Cash: Yeah. I've got plenty of screws in my box now.

Jeff Blood: Yeah, we all do. Some in my head, too, though.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, there you go. Well, Jeff, we have a tradition on The Articulate Fly. We always ask all of our guests to share their earliest fishing memory.

Jeff Blood: Yeah, so mine is very clear. I grew up in Erie County on a little farm pond that was dug along Interstate 90. When they were building the highway, they used the dirt to build the pond. And it was stocked with bluegill, bass, bullheads. And my older brother was 15 years older than me, bought me a casting rod. It was a new fiberglass with the multi really bright colors, if you remember those.

And my brother, two years older than me, was also fishing with a new rod. He was catching bluegills one after another. I couldn't catch them. And I finally hooked one that was a huge three and a half inches. And rather than crank, I decided to sprint backwards and drag it out on the bank.

And I'm going to make a comment about that, that I was so thrilled to catch that fish. And 62 years later, because I'm 66 now, I still have that same enthusiasm as the first time I caught that little bluegill. So that's my memory.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. That's awesome. And when did you come to the dark side of fly fishing?

Jeff Blood: Well, I had four older brothers. Three of them were 10 years and older than me. So by the time I was old enough to fish, they were all driving. And the great thing about that is they loved hunting and fishing. So I got to go lots of places locally trout fishing and bow and arrow fishing for carp and all that type of thing.

My oldest brother had a fly rod. That's how he preferred to fish. Tied a few flies, was okay at it, but that's how he wanted to fish. So I would sneak his rod out during the day while he was at work and catch bluegills and whatever. But I would always get my spinning rod out to fish for bass and so on and so forth.

At the age of 18, I just put my spinning rod away. I had built my own fly rod and never looked back. If you lay rods down and say, pick one of the rod you want to fish, no matter where I'm at in the world, I'm going to pick up the fly rod. That's what I love to do.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, that's pretty neat. And back then, it was no small feat to build your own rod.

Jeff Blood: It actually was a huge mountain just by hooks. People don't realize what we didn't have back then or access to growing up. Where I grew up, I don't think there was a fly shop within 100 miles or maybe even more. And the Herders catalog, if you remember Herders, they were out in South Dakota. It was like the candy store of all things. And I would go in there and have my wish list, but never enough money to buy what I needed. So it was a long, slow process developing as a fly fisherman. But that was part of the intrigue.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, it's funny you say that, because for all of us that came of age before the Internet, and also, too, quite honestly, everyone having a credit card is a relatively recent phenomenon. And so I can just remember asking my mom to write checks for very small amounts of money to mail somewhere to get something.

Jeff Blood: Yeah, well, that's the way it was back then. The beauty of the Internet today is the younger guys can teach themselves or watch a video, learn how to tie a fly. We had to try to read a book. In most cases we couldn't, we had to buy a fly in a shop somewhere and bring it home and kind of deconstruct it to figure out what it is. So that's the benefit of the Internet today.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, absolutely. And so obviously you've been in the sport for quite a while. Who are some of the folks that have mentored you on your fly fishing journey? And what have they taught you?

Jeff Blood: Well, that list is pretty extensive. The pinnacle of that would be Lefty Kreh. I think lots of people in the industry can say that about Lefty. I had the good fortune of meeting Lefty in 1978 at an event west of Pittsburgh, where I live. And about an hour's drive, maybe a little longer, Lefty was there doing his typical casting demonstration.

And I happened to be there with a friend of mine who owned the local fly shop at the time. And when we got back, he said, I'm gonna call Lefty up and see if he will come and help us with our schools. And he did. And then I was tagging along as a quasi instructor. At the time, I was a high end intermediate. But there were very few experts that we knew.

We brought Lefty in and Lefty immediately just caused me to be awestruck in terms of his knowledge and so on and so forth. Taught me a lot about casting, but lots of other things. Lefty was the pinnacle of our industry. The one thing he left with me that I think is most important and touched my life from my youth was, he said to me one day that excellence whispers.

And what he was really saying is that people don't need to be arrogant and toot their own horn. If you're really good at something this show, that you're good by doing what you do. And so it's more a philosophical thing. The other thing that he taught me was to look deeper, investigate. Not to be shallow, one dimensional in my thinking, but to think beyond just the obvious. So I put him there.

But then, as far as that's more the philosophical aspect of it. But a lot of the guides on the Bighorn River. I fished the Bighorn River the first time in 1982 and then went back out and we fished it with a guide out of George Anderson's Fly Shop because there were no fly shops in the area. I think the Bighorn Trout Shop opened up in 1985 and then my Craig's Place shortly after.

But I ended up guiding the river with Mike Craig, Jim Lowry, a guy they called Stretch, Brad Downey and Clint Horsley. And between them the collective knowledge of leader design, casting, fly timing, all those indicator fishing. To that point I had never indicator fished. And length of rod. They were fishing 10-foot rods before it was even acceptable to fish 10-foot rods. And they all shared that information with me.

And of course when you go out there, you do that, you bring it back with you. And then when you start having success, your friends around you start saying hey, what are you doing? And you share with them. And that's kind of the viral or contagious aspect of learning in the market.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, that's interesting too because the Bighorn is a great classroom because it will absolutely humble you. It certainly humbled me many times.

Jeff Blood: Well, I just came off the Bighorn last. What did we fish Wednesday, Thursday, Friday? It was as good as I've ever seen it. The fish are extremely healthy. They're 17 to 20 inches. They're fat, they're strong. You can't fish below 4X. You really need to be fishing 3X. The problem is you also have to fish size 20s and quite frankly you can't thread the 3X through the size 20 eyelet. And so you had to go to 4X. And we hooked a lot of fish. We just didn't land that many.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, very neat. Yeah. The last time I was there, we stayed at Cottonwood Camp and it was when they were still working on the dam. So you could do that first float in probably 30 or 45 minutes if you didn't get out and wait a little bit.

Jeff Blood: Yeah, well that was what, three years ago they were working on the dam. They had it kind of messed up at the time. The Trico hatch was really good because I fished it then also. But once the Trico hatch is over, I mean the river was dead and I've never seen it that way. I fished it almost every year for 25 years. And then I took about 10 years off because the river went through a downturn.

And then they came back and then so I decided to go out and fish. And never have I seen it that you can't put on a San Juan Worm or scud and catch fish and you just couldn't. Nobody, I mean, it's one thing that's not me doing it or my boat, but there was nobody catching fish and nothing below three miles. So that's just when they've got to do what they have to take care of the dam. It is what it is. And that's part of fishing.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. I think that's the great life lesson is you can only take what the river's willing to give you, right?

Jeff Blood: Yep. That's what you do.

Marvin Cash: And so kind of coming back to the east coast. You've been really fishing Steelhead Alley from the beginning. And for those of us that don't really know what it was like before there was an aggressive introduction of steelhead into the Great Lakes. Why don't you let folks know a little bit about the creation of the fishery and kind of how it's evolved over the years?

Jeff Blood: Yes. Sometime in the 50s, I was born in 1954, there was an article written called Steelhead Alley. I think it was in Field & Stream. All of my older brothers talked about the article. They called it Steelhead Alley. In Pennsylvania, you were not allowed to fish in the stream until the first day of trout season, which was always the second Saturday. So if you know anything about steelhead, they're mostly running prior to that. So anything that was being caught was actually on the tail end of the run.

That's just the point I want to make to people because the fish were running sooner and some were spawning and going out and never really able to be fished to. And I caught my first fish, what we called lake run rainbows back then, or lakers is what the local people called them, not lake trout, which are known as lakers. And I was seven years old, I actually was across from what they call Uncle John's Campground today.

But on the first day they would stock trout by the bridges. So take a bunch of buckets, walk down, dump them by the bridges. And my brother, two years older than me and myself, we couldn't get in where the fish were stocked because all the adults had it all blacked out. So we walked downstream, found a big bunch of suckers and we didn't care. And we're fishing the suckers and I actually caught a 24-inch lake-run rainbow at the age of 7. I caught it on a Zebco 202 on a fiberglass rod.

And I was the hero because I had this great big huge fish and all these guys are catching these 9 to 12-inch fish. So I was the big stud of the day. But from there we started fishing Trout Run. You were allowed to fish this little tiny, I'll call it a spring fed stream. Not very big, you could almost jump across it. But it had natural reproduction in it. And so we would go there again in April and sometimes in May and we would fish. And you can see the fish, they're 30 inches long in a little tiny stream.

But the fishery basically was made up of those fish that survived from the stocking in Crooked Creek and an Elk Creek. And those are the only streams I know of that were in Pennsylvania that ran directly into the stream in Pennsylvania that were stocked. And then some of the natural reproduction in those small little niche areas like Trout Run. There's a little stream called Chiller Creek up off from the west branch of Conneaut Creek that has natural reproduction. And then I think Cattaraugus Creek definitely had natural reproduction, but not enough to really build a fishery. It was just remnants.

And then a guy by the name of Bob Hett, if you go up there and fish and you see all those shrubs that they're raising to sell to people. He owns all that stuff. And he went to the west coast and brought genetically pure steelhead eggs back here, propagated them, stocked them, and had a phenomenal return of steelhead.

And the fish commission at the time was stocking coho salmon. There was some decision made to quit stocking coho and start stocking steelhead only. And they switched over to that. And I don't know when that was. It was in the 80s, I'm going to say like mid-80s. And the runs back then were phenomenal.

The crazy thing is through the 80s and early 90s I fished in the fall. Most of the fish ran in November. So right now we have a ton of fish in the system. I mean right now there are hundreds of fish in every pool with no water. When we get the first rain, they're going to get rain tomorrow. I guess they should just tear them up. But they're running earlier and earlier.

Now I think that's by design from the fish commission so that people can fish for them in better weather. The concern I have is can they sustain the run though for a long period of time so that you can fish in November and December like we traditionally did, but that's what went on in the time I would fish like the first day of deer season is always in Pennsylvania is always after Thanksgiving.

So I would go up on Friday after Thanksgiving and I would fish, literally have the stream to myself. And each pool has 30 to 50 fish in it. So you'd go in and catch eight, nine, ten fish out of one pool and walk down to the next and down the next. Well, you still catch a lot of fish today, but it's just different because there's a lot of people fishing.

It literally is a world class fishery. It's sometimes taken for granted because to catch the size of fish and as many fish as we catch, we would probably have to spend a minimum of $5,000 going to the west coast into Alaska. And you're not going to catch them on the west coast unless you go into B.C. or Alaska in the numbers that we're catching them.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. And so I know you've got a fall run. Do you also have a spring run like they do on the other side of the Great Lakes?

Jeff Blood: Well, we do. What I've noticed over my fishing time is that Pennsylvania does not have a very strong spring run. They do get some spring fish, but nothing compared to what Ohio gets. This last year in Ohio was epic. I mean, 50 fish hookups were easy. Now I'm not saying 50 landed fish because they were big and there was a lot of wood in the river. But 50 fish was easy on a bunch of days.

And like the Grand River cooperated this year. They didn't have a ton of rain, which normally blows that river out forever. And I mean I've seen periods where it doesn't get fished for three months because you can't get on it. But all the other systems also had fish. They've got I think seven to eight big systems. And actually the better water is in Ohio. With the exception of the Cattaraugas in New York State.

Pennsylvania has small streams with lots of fish in them, but they're small and Ohio's got much more room. They've done a really good job with public access. I mean just a great job. Like the Ashtabula River. In my understanding of the Ashtabula, the native tongue means river of many fish. They cleaned it up. It had some chemicals in the lower portion. They've cleaned that up. They're now stocking it. It was full of fish last year, last spring. And same with Conneaut Creek.

Conneaut Creek is historically my most favorite stream to fish for steelhead. And I fish it both in Pennsylvania and in Ohio because it originates in the town of Dixonburg in Pennsylvania and flows north and then cuts west and goes into Ohio. And it's a great fishery. I would advocate to people if they want to do some great spring steelhead fishing, to go into Ohio.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. And in terms of, are there differences around the Great Lakes, say the Pennsylvania, Ohio steelhead, versus steelhead in Michigan and other parts of the Great Lakes, or are they all behave pretty much the same?

Jeff Blood: Well, that's controversial. I guess way back when this program first started and I mean it caught on, they being the fish Commission as well as some independent organizations brought various strains of west coast steelhead. And so they had pure strains of the Skamania as an example, which is a long, slender fish. It's a summer run fish in Indiana. That's their targeted fish is the Skamania. It's very aerodynamic. It'll jump as many as 10 or 12 times.

And they had the what they call the New London strain in Ohio and then the Manistee strain from Michigan. But I think what they've done is they've mongrelized all of those fish. And now they have a strain in Pennsylvania they call the Trout Run strain because Trout Run is where the fish cultural station is that raises the small fish.

And it's almost shameful in one sense that they didn't try to keep them pure. I think there's a little bit of it going on across lake because that's all natural reproduction. And it only makes sense that if a certain fish runs with another fish that they match up and spawn, which is the concern I have. Our fish here are spawning earlier and earlier and earlier.

And we've got lots of fish right now. When we have lots of fish, it's tremendous. But there's a big harvest that goes on, and lots of people like to keep them for their eggs or keep them to eat or smoke. And if you don't have more fish backfilling, then the quality of the fish fishing goes down because the numbers go down.

And whereas in Ohio, they're getting more of a spring run, they do get a fall run, but they get more of a spring run of fish over there. So I switched from Pennsylvania and New York in the fall and go mostly to Ohio now. Now Conneaut Creek has both because Pennsylvania stocks on a road called Beaver Center Blacktop in the West Branch. And I think they put at least 50. No, I can't remember the number. It's over 50,000 and it could be as high as 75,000.

And then Ohio stock their strain of fish, which they get or have been getting. I don't know what's going on currently. Fish from Michigan, it's that Manistee strain, which is a fall run fish. So the Manistee have a tendency to run later, like November, versus the T8 fish. So they're kind of creeks getting a slug of all of them. And so you just need to know that to know when and where to go, I guess.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, that's interesting. And you were talking earlier about, I guess, trying to match up how many fish they're putting in versus how many fish people are harvesting. But I know there have been some environmental and ecological challenges in Steelhead Alley. What are we looking at today?

Jeff Blood: Well, we always want to think that invasive species are bad. I'm going to make a comment. Somewhere throughout history, everything's been invasive, and the question becomes, is it good or bad? So when I was, say, 6, 8, 10 years old, my grandmother had a cottage right on the shore of the lake. And if you got a northeast wind, that churns the lake up really bad. And then when that settles out, the lake turns back to normally wind either out of the south or out of the west. And your lake clears up.

But there would be this pasty. I don't even know how to explain it, muck for about anywhere between 20 to 40 feet from the beach that you would have to wade through. And it would be like putting Vaseline on your body. It was grayish green, made up of, I don't know what dead seaweed and who knows. And it was awful.

And today the lake is as clean as you can have a lake be. You can see down to the bottom and 20 feet of water easily. The zebra mussel, I think is what has done that in the sense of they're a filter and they filter all that out and help clean it up.

The other thing that's occurred is there's been an explosion in bait. And the amount of bait that is in the lake is mind boggling. I mean I've been out with a couple of charter guys. I don't really prefer to troll for anything. And just as the skill is in the captain. And cranking in a walleye is like cranking in a shoe, but they eat well.

Anyway, the fish finder would, we'd go over a school of bait and it might be three quarters of a mile long. And you just keep going and you can't get out of it to the point where your lines, you can see that they're hitting the bait when you're bringing the lines through the bait. So that's really good because there's a lot of food out there.

Even though they estimate now there's 150 million walleye in a lake, last year they estimated 60 million. And the year before that was 30 or 40 million, which is still a lot of fish. And it just keeps getting bigger in the walleye. And that's one of the things that they want to blame the reduced numbers that we've had in the past on, predation to the smalls. And I would say, okay, I can buy that. But I don't think that's what's going on. I think it's something that's going on in the stocking program.

And the question I would have if you and I ran this as a business, we would look to ourselves first and say, what are we doing? Or what have we changed? And if we haven't done anything or changed anything, then we got to look outward, right?

And going back to when they started stocking upstream, 18.5 or 6 miles on Elk Creek, and they're dumping in almost 400,000 fish, by the way, all in pretty much the same spot, which is kind of stupid. And I think there was just a lot of mortality with them. The time of year they were stocking and so on and so forth.

And what that did is the reason they did it back up was to try to keep the Pennsylvania fish from straying out of their system and going over into the Cattaraugas or going over in the Ohio system. But what I think they did overall was just reduce the survival rate across the board in the lake because Pennsylvania stocks the most fish. We stock over a million. Ohio does around 400,000. And I can't remember what New York is. Don't hold me the exact numbers, but it's like 400,000.

So we're doing almost three times the fish with only 60 miles of shoreline. And when we tinker with that stuff, we can actually mess it up and just trying to keep all the fish for ourselves. It's kind of stupid because one fishermen don't know state line. We really don't. We go to where the fishing is and the fish definitely don't know state lines. And let nature do what nature does best and feed that.

So now this year looks to be like we're going to get really big returns. So then the question would be, 150 million walleye in the lake, and we're getting these really big returns, which would point to me to say it's not predation, because if it was, they've got the worst chance of surviving that they've ever had with all the walleye. Why are we getting really big returns? And what did you change? Or if they didn't change anything, then what went on in the lake? How do we determine that?

Now I'm going to say something in defense of our Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission. I wouldn't want their job because I do think they don't have the resources. I mean, they cry that all the time. But I think it's a tough job to figure it out with the resources that they have. And unlike other states, there's no state money that comes to them. Everything comes from licenses and a few other things that they do. I wish the state of Pennsylvania would actually fund some of this and we would have better output.

Marvin Cash: Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. It's always. I don't know, it's. I think fishing and game everywhere, even if they're better funded than maybe they are in Pennsylvania, always have a challenge, always.

Jeff Blood: And somebody's always not happy. And I've said this to a lot of my friends. We have a tendency to bitch about things and what I say to them. It's easy to bitch. It's really hard to come up with a solution. And so there's a time for you to quit bitching and start helping. And so that's what I'm trying to do now, is look at it and say, how can I help?

Marvin Cash: Yeah, it's interesting you say that because my tactic with the complainers is to always offer them a seat on whatever board or committee I'm involved with. And it usually takes care of the problem.

Jeff Blood: Yeah, yeah, it's pretty much.

Marvin Cash: A cure all for complaining.

Jeff Blood: Yeah, there's a lot of people that care out there. And they're doing good things. I mean, the fish commission is trying, they're trying to get us more access. Ohio's got a better system. It's funded by local government and by state government. They've got tremendous public access. I mean, place I fish on the Grand. They've got a bathroom that's clean twice a day. They've got pavilions to sit down and change your wares. It's just beautiful. And lots of stream access.

And the question is, where's Pennsylvania? Where. So our state park System and the DCNR or whatever they call it needs to kind of wake up to Erie County and look at the amount of tourism that's coming in there and say, well, how can we help? Because there's a lot of people coming up there to fish.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, absolutely. And talking about the fishing, one of the things I remember when we first met and we were fishing Cattaragus Creek, was I was really struck with the simplicity of your gear and your flies. And I was wondering if you could share kind of your setup in your fly box with folks.

Jeff Blood: Sure. So as we all go through the path of fly fishing and you're learning, you always have the fear of never having the right fly. So when you really don't know what flies are going to happen or you need at any time, you end up carrying almost everything you own. And so I remember carrying green drake dry flies in August encountering a Trico hatch, because I just didn't know any better. Okay. But I had them with me just in case I needed them. That's how much of a neophyte I was.

And as I learned, it's like, wait a minute. Green drakes aren't going to come off until next June. I don't need that box. Oh, I don't need this box. I don't need that box. And it's kind of like a teardrop, right? You're real wide at the bottom, and then you start to turn and come into the point.

And once you acquire a lot of experience, experience in fly fishing, you pretty much can predict most of what you will need and own in every fishery or with a little bit of investigation, you can come up with it pretty quick.

And what I have found in steelhead fishing, and I'm going to say something that I've tried, almost everything there is tried. Someone will come out with a new fly pattern and whatever. And there's a bunch of books written on steelhead fishing and they've got 450 fly patterns and so on and so forth. And I don't want to be negative to anybody, but most of the reason they do that is that they didn't put the fly patterns in there. They would have a pamphlet because you can't just write that much about what it takes to steelhead fish.

And I fish basically with a lanyard. Okay, let me back up. So you need your rod, you need your reel, you need your line and what you wear, okay? And then from there you need a leader, you need an indicator if you're chucking and ducking and you need some split shot and you need your flies, and you're pretty much set to go.

So I back myself up in my little pouch and my zipper on my waders with an extra indicator, an extra leader, extra split shot. And one of everything that I might need inside of that little pouch, and I tuck that away and then I wear a lanyard.

And I started wearing a lanyard in Montana because you boat fish on the Bighorn River, and you don't, you're not very far away from your boat, so you leave your all your stuff in the boat and you take a little thing applies and tippet and you go fish. So adopting that, coming back here, I wear a lanyard.

I've got three, what I call quick shots. They're sold by Frog here. What they really are are the little things that your earplugs come in when you're at shooting range. They look like a change purse.

Marvin Cash: Yep.

Jeff Blood: And I throw three sizes of split shot into that because I find. And by the way, I want to throw something up? I fish winged lead split shot. And I know that's controversial in two ways. I've had people tell me, well winged split shot hang up on the bottom more. And I would say that's a figment of your imagination. And we would scientifically go to the river and prove it by just bring up two rods and start fishing and see who hangs up.

And the purpose of wing split shot is to quickly remove or add weight as you encounter different fishing situations as you're moving up or down the system. So BBB in 3 ought to, seems to get it done for me almost anywhere. I fish in Steelhead Alley now.

So I have three of those. I've got two fly boxes, I use the Orvis or Morel foam fly boxes and I burn a little hole with a coat hanger in the corner of it and I put an old piece of fly line and put a loop on it and hang them off from my lanyard because time of getting in and out of stuff is what causes you to catch more fish. The more your lines in the water the more you catch fish. So I put them on the lanyard. It's really easy.

And my tippet material on the tippet dispenser and I carry 4X. I seldom use it. It's mostly 3 and sometimes 2. 2X in really high but not blown out water. I'll divert for a second. The mistake that a lot of people make in reading the gauges on the Internet is that the gauge most of the time is not telling you turbidity.

So you can have a high water event normally later in the season after the depends on how much rain you get. It flushes all the dirt and stuff off the fields and whatever. And then your high water event later in the year can be epic fishing because one the fish feel more secure. They're laying out stuff's coming by them faster, they're going to react quicker and it's they can't eat it if they can't see.

So they don't go on those days because they believe that it's blown out. Unfortunately there's no way could actually know unless you go. And I've just made the decision that I'm going to go on the day that I think historically has taught me to go and I've picked some days where nobody on the river, tons of fish.

I mean I think I mentioned we fished two weeks ago before I went to Montana. I fished about four hours, had 20 hookups, maybe caught, I don't know, 12 if I was lucky. Landed about half and really nice fish, 26 to 29 inches. And nobody there because they just aren't reading it correctly. Anyway, I got off in a tangent, but that's kind of how I view it.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, and so you've got the lanyard and then you're only fishing two or three patterns. Right?

Jeff Blood: So I fish mostly. Okay, let me back up. If fish have low water conditions, that's a whole different game. When it's low, there's been lots of fishermen. They're bombing them with every bright colored thing. You need to go to a dark color. So you need to go to some nymphs, small stone flies, Hare's Ears, stuff like that. You'll catch fish on that stuff.

And Carl Wexelman, a well known guide up here, he does his dry-dropper in those conditions very successfully. And occasionally you'll catch one on the dry fly. I just don't go fishing in those conditions because I don't have to. Okay. I just wait until we get our first train and then I go.

So once you have good flows, I mean I'm fishing blood dots, which is the pattern that imitates an egg. And I will fish that, that the albumin or the major portion of the fly is tied with egg blow bug material. And then I change the color of the dot just to shake it up a little bit with four colors. So I have cherise golden nugget, apricot supreme, which matches the yolk exactly when it's wet. And then cherise, chartreuse and golden nugget. So those are the four colors.

And then I fish an abbreviated white zonker pattern that was code named by my 8-year-old son, White Death, way back when he did a lot of fishing with me. And it's called the White Death, White Zonker. And all it is is an abbreviation of the way it's tied. So it's kind of sparse, it's an inch and three quarters long, no weight on it. And blackhead, orange tie in at the bend of the hook.

And that's the pattern that's now my patterns. I tie for speed because if you're not losing a dozen to three dozen flies on an outing, a good long eight hour outing, you're not really fishing. That's you're either being too timid or you're not getting on the bottom. You're not hooking up fish because you're not doing that. Therefore you're not breaking any off and you're just not consuming the flight.

So I want to be able to tie them quickly. And I'll say this, I use Danville flat waxed 210 denier red because it also makes the fly much more durable. And therefore if you have to use your force up to get the fly out of the fish, you're not tearing it up and it just works better.

Marvin Cash: Yeah, got it. And then in terms you generally fish a floating line and you're probably fishing what, something between a six and an 8-weight, right?

Jeff Blood: Yeah. So I've always fished in 8-weights. Now the reason is, 7-weight to me is a tweener. Lots of guys love them and I don't want to step on their thinking. And when you're trying to, when you first get into the sport, okay, you go buy a fly rod, you go buy, let's say a 5-weight. And back in my day, 300 bucks is a big deal. So you buy a 300 fly rod and you're kind of afraid to tell your new wife that you spent 300 on a fly rod, right?

And then you decide to go steelhead fishing. You realize that man, that 5-weight just is being like not gonna, isn't gonna work. And I need a bigger rod. Now I gotta go not buy another rod. And it gets to the point where what do I buy?

So I look at it then from the perspective and fortunately I was able to do quite a bit of traveling. What else am I going to maybe fish for that I need a bigger rod? I'm looking at bonefish and I'm looking at permit. So if I buy a 7-weight to fish steelhead and permit because a lot of I system would for a bonefish, but I get a 30 plus inch permit on there. I just think you're less of advantage than an 8-weight.

There's a little more to it. Okay. So I decided to go with 8-weights. What I find with the 8-weight and there's not that much difference between the two rods. I mean there is a difference but not that much. And what I most mostly found was, in wind, I can cast an 8-weight better into the wind. I can throw more weight easily with that rod. And there's just a little more. I don't know what the word would be tenacity in the fighting capability of the rod on fish.

So as you gain skill, those who have skill overcome deficiencies with their skill. They adjust their casting stroke or put a little more oomph into it or whatever. But over a lot of time, it kind of wears you out. But for the intermediate, they're sometimes at a distance danger when if they had an 8-weight, they would be fishing much better than using a 6-weight as an example.

And so that's what I do now. A lot of my friends are 7-weight and we talk about it all the time, and then when they break one off, I laugh at them.

Marvin Cash: Well, folks, I hope you enjoyed part one of our interview with Jeff. Stay tuned for part two, where we pick up where we left off and talk about steelhead tactics and Jeff's time in the fly fishing episode industry. And remember, folks, if you like the podcast, please tell a friend. And please subscribe and leave us a rating and review in the podcast of your choice. Tight lines, everybody.