2026 Olympic Peninsula Winter Steelhead - Thoughts and Recap
I am sitting down by our warm wood stove on a sunny day at the end of March, with only about a week left in this year’s winter steelhead season on the OP. In this post I am not only hoping to recap some of the important lessons I have learned this season, but I also want to share some other related news about the direction of this website and my life. If you care only about the season recap, skip the below section.
First of all, I am super excited to say that I have received my Food Fish guide license a few days ago in the mail, which means I can take clients out for salmon this season. Next year, I will be sure to have my Game Fish license all ready to go in time for the steelhead season. I was really quite unsure for a while about whether or not to pull the trigger and get licensed because, well, first it costs a decent amount of money, and second because I wasn’t quite sure if I was truly ready yet. After long talks with close friends out here, including Jeff, some of Jeff’s buds and Tom Mathews, I went for it.
I will always approach this field from a place of deference, striving to constantly learn from those more experienced and more knowledgeable than myself, and I look forward to more days this year in boats with some of the guides I really look up to (Keith A, Bob Kratzer, Woody) and those who I have not had the pleasure of fishing with yet (Mikey Z, Jack Iotte to name a couple).
With that news out of the way, I also plan to make some updates to this website. The “Stories” section is something I am mulling changing as it, quite honestly, highlights some of my earliest moments fishing and all of the rookie mistakes that go along with that…Put simply, there’s some fairly embarrassing stuff in there. For now, I will leave the section unchanged for the sake of transparency and telling the whole story, at the possible expense of turning folks off due to my silliness.
Steelhead 2026 Season Recap
This recap will be structured by month, with a short breakdown of what the conditions were like, where we tended to fish, what worked and what we learned.
January
Our season started off fairly slow as we were still in the process of moving from Seattle to Forks area…Still rocked by sinking the boat in October, my confidence on the oars was pretty low so we opened the season with a lower Bogey float in early January. We then floated the hatchery run on the Duc and lost one on Blue Scale, the first plug bite of the season and the first real water of the season. This opened things up, as we were finally moved and ready to rock. At least so we thought….We only caught one steelhead in January, on the South Fork Hoh with a spinner, also the only steelhead caught on a spinner for us this season.
Dime bright dandy hen on Upper Hoh
Lesson Learned: Simply did not float enough. 3 floats, two of which were lower bogey ain’t gonna cut it. We are most effective on plugs, can’t plug from the bank (I mean not really…)
February
Feb was a whirlwind of fishing. We started the month off strong banking the Upper Hoh above the park line and hooked our biggest fish of the year at 36 in, dime bright hen in fast untouched water. For the first part of the month we kept our focus on banking, trying to access water that boats either couldn’t or wouldn’t get to before us. We focused on the tumbling rapids area on the Duc and the Mini Canyon in the Hoh, and really only had success in the tumbling rapids area with Teagan landing her first fish of the season, a nice colored hen.
Then, began what I will call the Wilson’s Era. We floated Hatchery to either Wilson’s or Leyendecker 8 times between February 7 and 28…This was the most productive stretch of steelhead fishing to date for us, landing 9 fish on 13 bites on those floats alone. Sprinkled in between those floats were 3 fish landed on the Duc during float days. That’s a total of 12 landed steelhead from Feb 18th onwards. Included in one of those lost fish is the biggest we have ever hooked, a colored buck we lost in the net by the boat that was pushing 30 pounds on the lower Bogey.
The time spent running that same stretch (primarily just the stretch from the Hatchery to Wilson’s) over and over again was immensely enlightening. I think a lot of people, out of state guides, recreational anglers who aren’t able to fish these rivers quite as much, will often resort to fishing conventionally appealing “steelhead water”. This is often the best one can do if they aren’t able to get excessive time out on the water. But for those who are able to, the local guides, the rec guys who have fished these rivers for 40 years, that won’t do. This group of anglers know exactly where to look in each stretch of river at a given flow, given temp, etc. They know what specific rock, seam, pocket to target because some of those, the good ones, can be upwards of 90% hookup rates.
For instance, the Smiley run on the Bogey Hatchery run, failed to produce a bite once out of 8 floats, with many days yielding 2 or 3 bites. The bucket before the Goodman bridge was pushing a 80% hookup rate. All fish except one in Feb were hooked on plugs.
Landed this missile hen in the Smiley run behind a boulder that rarely fails to produce. Biggest hen we have landed to date and largest fish of the season.
Lesson Learned: Focus your floats as much as possible on one stretch until you know it like the back of your hand. You should know exactly what rock your plugs are pushin, exactly what seam theyre swimmin. Then move to the next stretch.
Bonus Lesson: Double, Triple check your gear. Drag, line fray, hooks, rod holders. Everything needs to be dialed, always. Otherwise you will lose the fish of a lifetime.
March
March unfortunatley was riddled with long trips (going forward we will not be traveling in March…) so our days on the water were limited. But going with the above theme, we floated Riverside to Hillstrom 4 times with solid results. Not only is this section our home stretch as we live 2 minutes away from the Hillstrom launch, but it is also perhaps the prettiest on the Peninsula.
The first day floating this stretch we had 4 bites, with three fish showing themselves to be very nice size. While we only landed one, we lost another trophy buck by the boat, and the one we did land was a real cool downriver hen who had dumped her eggs and still boasted nice size.
First fish in the Riverside run. Screamer hen peeled line all over us.
Also got experience taking out a nice fellow who came across this site who had flown out from Houston and was in the area hoping to get a day of fishing in. Was really fun to show him the coolest river in the world.
Lesson Learned: We hooked four fish on a rising Sol Duc…Maybe a fluke..maybe not….Usually fishing a rise is a bad bet, but maybe not always on the Upper Duc eh?
Bonus Lesson: I will need to learn another method as well as I have learned how to plug so as to not be a one trick.
Concluding Thoughts
Season was really great. So lucky to have been able to fish 35 days this season and hook as many fish as we did. I made a few more friends and contacts this season too which makes me even more excited to continue to expand my community and network so that we can learn from the many talented and wise anglers out on these rivers. Now, we turn our attention to work around the property, clearing brush, mowing the fields, boat / trailer maintenance and more…oh. And Springers….Springersss
