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Ahead, flanking each side of the river, are the 400-foot-high concrete walls of American and Canadian power-generating stations. Over our heads, the bridge to Canada is jammed with semitrucks backed up at customs. He tells us it’s the Lewiston stretch, where the bodies of most suicide jumpers at Niagara Falls 10 miles upriver eventually resurface. At 30 mph, I feel the back of the boat fishtail when Kessler runs over one of the many swirling holes that open and close in the turquoise flow. Having fished the area his whole life, Kessler is unfazed by the whirling Niagara. As I help friend and guide Ted Kessler launch his boat, the odor from the cleaning house suggests the steelhead bite has been good. Here, there is a fish-cleaning house paid for by the charter fishing association at Lewiston Landing where, every day from September through April, anglers launch beefy Lunds capable of handling the wind chop, vortexes, and extreme currents produced by a deep river moving millions of gallons of water through a relatively narrow gorge every minute. There are no fly shops on the banks of the mighty Niagara River, no drift boats. While strike indicators and nymphs are a key part of a Pulaski fly guide’s arsenal, 200 miles west in the quaint town of Lewiston, N.Y., electric fillet knives and Tupperware containers of home-cured egg sacs are standard issue. Edwards, his net still extended, looks at me and says, “Hey, that was some fight though, wasn’t it?” Then, with a quick headshake, the big steelhead snaps my line and splashes away. We have followed the steelhead for 200 yards, and now it is lolling on the surface but won’t let me bring it closer. He is nearly armpit deep, 40 feet downstream in the final shafts of light. Turn your rod to the left,” he instructs. Now Edwards is trying desperately to do the same with my last fish. There is a strict no-kill steelhead policy, and leader lengths are capped at 48 inches to make it harder for the occasional bad seed to sweep a fly at the end of a run in an attempt to snag. To fish here you must pay a daily fee, and a limited number of anglers are allowed. In the late 1980s, tired of hundreds of blatant trespassers leaving garbage on his property, Barclay, along with guides like Edwards, saw the opportunity to create a new fishery that would weed out the riffraff and take some strain off the highly pressured fish. If there is a visible testament to the attitude shift in Pulaski, it’s the Douglaston Salmon Run–a 21⁄2-mile private stretch of river on the property of former State Sen. But these days, instead of heavy rods and snag hooks at the tackle shop, anglers are buying Spey rods, shiny Estaz Egg patterns, and tapered leaders at the fly shop. Pulaski is still economically reliant on anglers. Thanks to the illegalization of snagging, as well as guides like Edwards who repainted Pulaski as a destination for conservation-minded sportsmen, and an ever growing infatuation with steelhead, the situation has changed. My backing is half gone and the fresh chromer isn’t about to turn around.īack then, pursuing steelhead largely took a backseat to salmon. “He’s going straight back to Lake Ontario.” The 59-year-old veteran guide, one of the first 10 to ever launch a float boat on the Salmon River, takes off on a sprint downstream with the net as he has thousands of times before in his 30-year career. “He just hit go home in his mental GPS,” says Gary Edwards with a laugh.
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I am fully aware that the odds are not in my favor as the fish changes direction and tears off downstream. I’m facing the same obstacles I did with the other six: There are multiple root snarls that this steelhead can run into, and it’s pulling against the 4-pound-test tippet necessary to fool these wary trout in the clear water. I know this will be my last hookup of the day. I have hooked seven steelhead in New York’s Salmon River today, and landed exactly one a quarter of the size of this fish. It’s difficult to pick out where my fly line meets the water in the darkened riffle, yet somehow a slight tick registers and suddenly there is a 15-pound steelhead with my egg fly neatly in the corner of its mouth 4 feet out of the water, lunging straight at me. The faint sunlight showing through a sky dense with cold, gray clouds is about gone.