Minnesota Steelheader

    A number of people have asked me, "Why do you guys include coasters in your creel project?" In the beginning, and we are talking pre-Creel Project, super data-junkie days, I was collecting everything and anything I could get my hands on; if it was data, I had to have it. By the way, never ask me about my photoperiod matrix unless you want to see paint get confused and then bored right off the walls....     At any rate, it was "Just 'Cause". I love coasters and brookies in general, and they were how I was introduced to trout fishing in the first place, so I have a bit of a soft spot.     Funny thing was that after we captured a number of years-worth of spring steelhead data, something jumped out at us. We didn't have enough of a coaster sample size prior to spring 2014 to even really speculate, but I think we're there now and you may find the results interesting.     What you are looking at are the last 5 years of...

    We finally found a little time to do some analysis, but there's much more to be done and much more to come, so bear with us...     Short of getting some late additions to the Creel Project, the numbers are pretty much in and there are some very interesting items to note. 2014 is shaping up to be one of the more unusual runs I can remember. Everyone is scratching their heads over the weather, the late ice, the sustained high flows, and the apparent mystery of the disappearing year classes of adults, both Steelhead and Kamloops all across the Big Lake; it is just plain strange.     I guess I don't want to do too much speculation on the mystery of the missing year-classes because I'm thinking that we just won't know if they are truly missing until we see some reports on trap efficiency. With the sustained high flows, it's entirely possible that quite a few fish simply bypassed the traps, so we'll just have to wait and see what ...

    Just some preliminary trap information. One of the things I discovered early on in my quest to better understand North Shore fishing was that simply plotting trends just wasn't well, understandable....     It's not that it doesn't provide good information, in fact trends are where you see those granular details and interactions between temperature, flow and fish movement. However it's not quite as intuitive as the weekly analysis format I finally put together; so here's the combined Knife/French trap numbers in that format:       Overall there are a couple things to note: Once again you can see that things really don't get rolling until after the upstream temperature intitiation thresholds are met. Flow averages this spring were crazy-high throughout the run, and most definately had an effect on fish movement throughout. But again, the weekly format filters out the granular so that you can see the big picture bette...