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Call of the Root: Lure of trout draws anglers even in dead of winter
By Journal Times staff
The day started with a grey sky that, for a moment shortly after 6 a.m., was streaked with pink. For the small group of die-hard anglers assembled Saturday along the banks of the Root River, it looked like an aerial rendition of their favorite fish.
Was it an omen, portending great action? Or were the fishing gods mocking us? There was only one way to find out.
Josh Lenda of Oak Creek and Joel Michel of Racine already were drifting baits when I met them under the great cottonwood trees lining the Root River in Lincoln Park.
"Morning," said Lenda, 18, of Oak Creek. "I think it's gonna be tough."
What else could get otherwise sane adults to crawl out of a warm bed before sunrise on a weekend morning and wade into an icy river? The Root provides plenty of reasons to be optimistic. Try about 90,000. That's how many steelhead - the common name for rainbow trout that run up the river during spawning migrations - are stocked in the river most years.
Some of those fish don't survive the shock of stocking. Others are eaten by gulls, some are gobbled by bigger fish and still others end up in the coolers of Lake Michigan fishermen. But enough return to the Root to provide reason to trudge down to the river on a cold, overcast March morning.
Make that most weekends. Word had gotten out that the conditions were tough and the only anglers on the water in this stretch were those of us who didn't have a long drive.
"I think it's the Internet," said Lenda, a fishing fanatic who, when he isn't on the water, is working in the fishing department at Jalensky's in Sturtevant. "They can share information so fast now that, once a report gets on there, they decide where they're going to fish."
Like anything in nature, though, it's good to show up and see what the day holds. Besides, it was a pleasure to have the river virtually to ourselves. The crowds will be here soon enough.
And the fishing the previous weekend was good. Lenda had caught 10 fish over the course of Saturday and Sunday, and in a couple hours stolen before work Monday, I was able to land three steelhead in the waters of Lincoln Park.
"There are some fish in the river," Lenda said. "We might have to move a little to find them."
The air was 33 degrees and had a bite to it. The many mallard ducks in Lincoln Park didn't seem to mind. Several pairs of drakes and hens paddled up and down the river, sometimes stopping to see if we had anything worth eating.
We also weren't the only fishers on the water. A mink popped out of a hole in the stone wall on the south bank, jumped in the water, swam east for a bit, crawled out on an exposed cement ledge and then disappeared.
While Lenda and Michel drifted spawn sacs through a deep run, something caught my eye in the near shallows. A pair of trout were swaying in the current, just above some light gravel. It was a redd, the shallow depression fish make in the bottom to hold their eggs, and the trout were performing their spawning dance.
Several times the hen turned on its side and "flashed," displaying a bright flank and vigorously working its tail to further clean out the redd. The buck stayed close by, waiting and watching.
Interestingly, the fish were brown trout, easily identified in the relatively clear water, and not steelhead, which are typically the most common fish in the river at this time of year.
Michel tried a drift through the redd. It was met with indifference. Two, three, four drifts, nothing. The fish spooked slightly, then returned. Michel switched to a tube jig.
As his bobber was poised to give a perfect drift to the fish, a pair of mallards noisily took off from the shallows and flew low and directly over the redd. The fish moved out, fast.
"The odds are stacked against us," Michel said, laughing.
After striking out on all the best producing runs and holes in Lincoln Park, we decided to move to a deep hole along a river bend in Washington Park, just downstream from the cable bridge in the golf course.
The sky had started to clear and at least we had sunshine. As we walked down to the river bank, a pair of common mergansers quickly paddled across the pool, peeking into the water every few seconds to see if it was worth a dive.
Several herring gulls wheeled in the sky above, and a few dozen Canada geese nibbled exposed grass on the fairways.
But the only other fishers at this normally popular spot were the mergansers, and we didn't pose a conflict with them. The ducks were after minnows or fingerlings, we were after something with shoulders, as they say. Preferably something in the trout family.
The Root River hosts spawning runs of three strains of steelhead. This time of year, you'll mostly find Chambers Creek strain steelhead in the river. As the weeks flip past, more and more Ganaraska strain fish will show. But there are also fair numbers of brown trout in the river.
Since these fish answer only to nature, not schedules, it's best not to anticipate what will strike next, just enjoy the moment when it comes.
The strategy was typical Wisconsin steelhead - a bobber and a spawn sac fished on a long, graphite spinning rod, one of the most productive presentations used on Lake Michigan tributaries. You can fish a tube jig or yarn fly the same way. Most strikes come as the bait ticks across the bottom.
We were joined by Chris Neitzel, a friend of Lenda who had just returned from a nine-day Florida vacation. The warm weather was nice, Neitzel said, but he was eager to get in some fishing.
"The first thing I did when I got back was take some spawn sacs out of the freezer," said Neitzel, of Oak Creek. "I didn't even unpack yet."
After an hour of fruitless drifts, a fish broke the surface toward the middle of the pool, just upstream of Michel. Five minutes later, Michel's float twitched twice and then disappeared.
Although he spends the majority of his fishing time working foot-long twitch baits for muskies, Michel needed no instruction about what to do next. He reared back and became the first to feel the lively strength of a fish at the end of the line. The fish gave ground at first, then began taking line and traveling up and down the pool.
Five minutes later, Lenda slid his net under a 26-inch brown trout. It was a hen, ripe with eggs, and after a couple of photos Michel returned the fish to the water.
"At least we got the skunk out of the net," Lenda said. "But it's going to be tough, that's for sure."
Neitzel had a brief hookup on a fish a few minutes later, but that was the end of the action this morning. We decided to trade our waders and a raw March day for some dry jeans and a heated building.
The fishing will improve as the water warms and the river rises with spring rain. It always has. Why should this year be any different? The scorecard this day showed one brown trout caught and released, one giant steelhead painted across the heavens. Even if the angling deities had a laugh at our expense, the second one's a keeper.
When that day comes, and it will, I might not fish at all. I might simply dwell in the richness of an April day in February.
Root River Facility up and running: The Department of Natural Resources has begun seasonal operation of the Root River Steelhead Facility in Lincoln Park.
This time of year, DNR crews will target steelhead, the common name for anadromous rainbow trout.
Three strains of steelhead are stocked in the Root: Skamania, Chambers Creek and Ganaraska. The Root is classified as a "brood" river, meaning it is one of the principal sites used by the DNR to collect steelhead for the state's Lake Michigan fisheries program. The steelhead returning to the Root and other rivers were reared at state hatcheries, stocked as fingerlings, and spent the next 2-4 years eating and growing in Lake Michigan.
Since most Wisconsin rivers that drain into Lake Michigan don't offer suitable spawning habitat for trout and salmon, adult fish are captured to provide the eggs and milt to start the next year class. Unlike salmon, steelhead are capable of spawning more than once, so the DNR (and many anglers) is careful to return the fish to the river.
Operational since 1994, the Root River Steelhead Facility is a state-of-the-art egg collection facility. The $650,000 facility was built through a cooperative effort of the Racine Salmon Unlimited Foundation, the City of Racine, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Natural Resources. The facility is free and open to the public. It features a fish ladder, underwater viewing window, covered work area, holding tanks, recovery tanks and a fish return pipe. The facility will likely be in operation through April.
Fish are typically processed two or three days a week, with most activity on Mondays and Fridays. For updates on activity at the facility, you may visit the DNR's Web site at www.dnr.state.wi.us or call the DNR's Lake Michigan Fishing Hotline at (414) 382-7920. The Root River information is most often listed toward the end of the recording.
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