THE EAINBOW AT SEA (STEELHEAD) 



guise, but he is still a rainbow, and if you could ' corral ' him 

 upstream and make a land-locked fish of him he would soon 

 assume, in aU probability, the colours, tints and heavier shape of 

 the typical rainbow. 



Our steelhead has long been misunderstood owing to this re- 

 markable difference of appearance ; but it is one and the same fish, 

 the rainbow of the mountains, the rainbow of the sea, merely 

 adopting a different garb, but so unlike, that for angling pur- 

 poses we may regard the steelhead as a separate and distinct 

 fish. 



On the Pacific Coast the steelhead is the joy of the winter 

 angler, the only trout that can be taken at that season as he 

 comes within the tide- water regulations and can be fished for in 

 California any month of the year. The steelhead can be found 

 in nearly all the streams of the Pacific Coast, from British Columbia 

 down to Los Angeles and even Lower California. He enters 

 the San Gabriel, and this may be called the southern limit, so far 

 as numbers are concerned. He increases in size and numbers as 

 we] go north, and at the lagunas of such streams as the Santa 

 Ynez he comes in from ten to twenty pounds, a sea trout in all 

 the term implies as he has been living in the Pacific, probably 

 off the mouth of rivers, and nke a salmon, is impelled by instinct 

 to go upstream to spawn. 



These journeys take the steelhead incredible distances from 

 the Pacific, far up the coast rivers beyond the Coast Eange, in 

 the Snake Eiver of Idaho and other localities. In every river 

 on the Pacific coast of I^orth America where the rainbow lives in 

 the upper waters, and can reach the ocean, the steelhead will 

 be found. In certain lakes in Washington he is land-locked. 

 Such a fish is shown in Figure 40-1. In Klamath Lake,Oregon, the 

 rainbow has established itself in the deep pools of the beautiful 

 little rivers, and is radiant in typical colouring ; but if you 

 angle in the lake proper, where the water is shallow and the colour 

 gray or Ught, the fish taken bear a strong resemblance to the steel- 

 head and is called a silver trout ; but it is a rainbow adapted to its 



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