Does anyone know if they have been caught in tay system

I wondered this having caught a few rainbows on both the river and Loch Tay this week - I know they are sometimes caught on Loch Awe, but not heard any concrete info / pictures on Tay

The problem would be determining whether or not they were actually steelhead as opposed to just a rainbow trout.

Since steelhead can run any time of the year depending on the genetic strain, there's no way of telling base on when it was caught. I suppose the only real way you could tell is if you caught a sea liced fish that was obviously fresh from the salt and making a run.

Grouse

interesting - I suppose they would have minimum weight had they been to sea & flesh is likley to indicate main feeding.

I have a friend who is a genetic scientist(he tests genes rather than any slight on where he came from ) who is a keen fisher and he says that their DNA is totally the same so you cannot test that way - wonder what makes them do it

The problem is that with anyone in the UK being able to tip in a truckload of rainbows anywhere they want, there's no way to know what size and how many rainbows are in a river, or how they got there in the first place.

It is correct to say that there is no genetic difference between a rainbow trout and a steelhead, but there are genetic differences between different populations of rainbow trout from different watersheds and geographic locations. So taking that into account, one could test a rainbow trout caught in the UK and find out if it even comes from a population where steelhead make up part of that genetic line.

But it is also true that that there are no genetic differences between the steelhead and the resident rainbows from the same watershed or regional population. In other words, there is no "go to sea" gene with an on or off switch attached to it so one can absolutely tell if the fish in question is a steelhead instead of rainbow that just hangs around in the river his whole life.

Only the steelhead know for sure and they aren't saying.

I'll tell you, though, when you latch into a steelhead for the first time there won't be a doubt in your mind. The first one I ever set the hook on was about 20 feet from me, and she came out of the water like a missile and leapt to at least my eye level doing about 3 full flips. I was so startled, I instinctively ducked.

Yeah, that'll get the old heart pumping.

Grouse

Actually Grouse thats not strictly true. You need the relevant permission. Tipping trout anywhere without it, is illegal.

MJ

This subject came up a while back and, as I recall, there were some well documented examples of folk catching sea run rainbows - in both the Scotland and somewhere on the South coast.

Whether any run the Tay is a different matter but look for the sea lice on fin-perfect hard-fighting rainbows for confirmation - you should be able to tell them apart from your average stockie.

Jon

The colouration also, no?
The are chrome and then from the photos I've seen go a pewter gray if I'm not mistaken.

Bri

Have SWFFers caught any in the sea?

PiB

First time I recall the word 'steelhead' and the UK in the same paragraph. The following is a bit of an over-kill read on Steelhead vs. 'sea run' rainbow trout, but DNA wise they're the same thing. Only real difference is in the specific populations vis a vis place of spawning. And even here the differences are quite small.

http://icesjms.oxfordjournals.org/cg...t/56/4/449.pdf

And Grouse's description above is 'dead on.' Only hooked one this past week on the North Umpqua, but save for the fish being 60'ish feet away ... exactly the same. Fish snapped 11# leader/tippet like it was a thread .....

There have been Steelhead on loch Awe for years and as Rainbows are not natural to these parts - then I presumed that escapees from the trout farms had for what ever reason made the long trek to sea with no obvious catalyst

(which was why I was wondering if this transition had happened in Tay system - or else where for that matter)

Some interesting contributions.

The other similar example of this I can think of if Brown trout taken to Argentina from UK many years ago for the benefit of wealthy colonialists....Now many decades later they have awsome Seatrout runs