At age 17, Davin Brandt caught his first steelhead trout, and, along with the fish, was hooked. The catch-and-release fish is unique in the trout family because it migrates—in Minnesota’s case, from Lake Superior to rivers and streams—to spawn. This means that the steelhead trout season is in the spring, and anglers begin preparing in late winter.
In the winter of 2005, years after his first steelhead catch, Brandt and his wife Angela, White Bear Lake residents, were expecting their first child. “I was recognizing that I probably wasn’t going to be able to go fishing that spring,” he says. So he began doing research to get more information on the trout, and found little to none. “I created Minnesota Steelheader, and it’s a website that gets [together] the information I already have, the information from friends and colleagues, and also from the DNR,” Brandt says. He wanted to create a space for people to learn about the fishing niche, which, he discovered, was actually dwindling.
“Back in the ’60s and ’70s, it really flourished,” Brandt says, “but there weren’t a whole lot of young people getting into it—it was kind of an old gentlemen’s club.” And Brandt recognized that in order for the sport to grow, people needed to be educated.
So, shortly after he launched the website, Brandt partnered with a friend. They started making deals with other small organizations and the DNR to get actively involved in the community, and started offering a free streamside clinic on the North Shore. “It was basically a guided service for eight people, and we taught them about the fishery, about Lake Superior, about the fish we were going after that day and how they relate to steelhead, and about the environment and the ecology,” Brandt says. Four years later, that free clinic is still happening; they’ve added a spring meet-and-greet, and adopted a river to clean.
Minnesota Steelheader became a nonprofit in 2014, and all the money raised goes straight into an account to pay organization costs.
With 11 board members, the small organization has a few goals outside of simply raising awareness. “One of our main focuses is women and children,” Brandt says, and reveals he’s seen an uptick in women and kids fishing.
The trajectory of the Minnesota Steelheaders has been extraordinary, Brandt says. And while the organization helps anglers in many ways, the steelhead trout is still the center of interest. “To me,” Brandt says, “it’s the most magnificent fish you can catch in the state.”
Steelhead Facts
- A cousin to the rainbow trout, steelheads are native to the Pacific Coast rivers.
- The first Lake Superior steelheads were transplanted from the coast in 1883.
- What separates them from their rainbow trout cousins is the fact that they migrate every spring to spawn, much like salmon.
- There are about 60 streams and rivers along the North Shore that steelheads use for spring migration.
- Once a commercial fish, today the steelhead is a catch-and-release fish. Half the fun, though, is trying to land these feisty, evasive fish.
