Wild Steelhead Coalition
			est. 2000 An organization dedicated to increasing the return of wild  steelhead to the waters of the Pacific Northwest

Secretary, Jon Velikanje

I grew up in Yakima fishing the Yakima River and most of its tributaries. My first encounter with a steelhead came as a young boy fishing with my father on the Yakima River in the canyon. We were fishing one of those late summer afternoon hatches. A very large head came up and took my dry fly. The next few seconds nothing really happened, then the water exploded and the fish was going up and across the river like a bullet. Moments later, the fish came to the end of the backing and was gone. I couldn’t find words to explain what had just happened, but I knew I wanted to do it again. There were good runs of steelhead in the Yakima River in those days.

I moved to Seattle in 1969, went to the University of Washington and graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering. During the early 80s, my wife and I fished the Yakima River most every weekend. The average fish was six to eight inches and mostly rainbow hatchery fish. A few years later, regulations on the upper Yakima were implemented to reduce harvest of trout and to discontinue planting hatchery fish. We saw an increase in the size of the average fish of two inches in each year following. By the end of the 80s, we saw a healthy population of twenty inch fish and very few hatchery fish. This for me was my first hand experience with what regulations and hatchery practices could do for a fishery. This is the reason I got involved in supporting the WSC. I want future generations to have the experience of catching and releasing wild steelhead.