There is something that keeps coming back to me, so I’ll share it with you, see what you think. But first a short story.

This is something that I confirmed to myself time and time over. We were plunking for silvers each August on my favorite river. My boat would be usually anchored at five am, we bait the hooks and toss it in there. Just glob of row and weight. Before long you could feel salmon mouthing the bait and you knew you had him! You could see your tip twitch a couple time and then suddenly the tip would go down! You had him!
Once there was a party of ten, all my friends, and we were fishing together from the boat or from the bank. We were sleeping in tents on the opposite side of the small river. My friend and I, we got up at up five and by 7am we had our limit of 3 silvers each (limit was from 3 to 6 fish per person, depending on the run). Time for breakfast. (and that was our usual experience during the salmon run, if they were in, we had them. I don’t mean to say we did not had our skunk days, but when the there was a salmon run on, we had them.)

The rest of the gang slept in since they had consumed a generous amount of beer the night before and we woke them at 7:00 and told them not to forget they came here for fishing. So the rest of the group started to fish around 8 and none of those people caught any fish for the rest of the day!! (we usually left the river at 3pm) The fish simply quit biting after 8-9 o’clock!! I verified this to myself many times over so eventually I fished only from 5-9am!

Of course I caught fish at different times outside this window, but in general this was by far the most producing time.

This long story leads me to a question that I was wondering about. As I read the local local Northwest forums with so many useful tips, nobody mentions the importance of time for success. Maybe it doesn’t apply here in NW, I don’t know. Is the time of the day not much of an issue fishing for steelies? What would be your thoughts on that?

Time of day is important for steelhead, but not nearly as much as it is for salmon. It has been my experience that steelhead will have several periods throughout the day when they like to bite. I think the early bite for steelhead is as much about being the first one to throw something in front of the fish as it is about the time of day.