Anyone got tips on what suckers will hit. Got a stream with some in it. I bet they’d be fun to catch. I tried some nymphs and they didn’t go for that. Ideas? Corn 
nightcrawlers…
Maybe something round and bright yellow:)
Shane
I target them with olive or olive/black micro-buggers (size 14). I use a gold bead and fish them on a furled leader with about 4 feet of flouro 4x or 5x tippett. Great fun on a 3wt.
Suckers will take an egg pattern when the Steelhead is running up the river. Just don?t touch the Suckers and try to keep them away from your net and line. Many of them create a really thick slim that sticks like glue to anything it touches. That is their defense mechanism; nothing will eat them because of it.
Larry 
—sagefisher—
Do the steelhead run in tennessee? Oh, and from what I understand muskie and northern pike will eat the heck outa suckers. They’re pretty decent fried too…
fish
Now that’s funny. I don’t care who you are!
Thanks for all the input. Sounds like a nice yellow corn-looking fly will do the trick. Maybe after some yellow objects get sent down stream before it…
Suckers were the biggest fish around when I was a kid. Well at least the biggest fish that I had access to till I got old enough for my first car (1955 vw bug ).
They are far harder to tempt than trout, carp, bass etc. They are bottom feeders and while they will leave the bottom on rare occasions to eat a ready snack it is more by chance than anything we ever did to entice them. We tried worms, spinners, flies, and some really stinky gooey stuff one of the old fellows told us would work. It didn’t. I have caught a few on single salmon eggs while targeting whitefish. They fight really well at first then just seem to give up.
They frustrated us kids because you could always see them in the river, big ones too. But they wouldn’t bite.
Finally we just made a depression in the creekbed laid a 6 foot wide x 12 foot long section of chicken wire across the creek. Two of us on either side of the creek just out of sight of the fish. Each of us holding a corner of the wire. We had a spotter on the high bank, it was the most important job. When the spotter could see a goodly number of suckers atop our wire he would yell. We would Yank upward and fold inward . If we were lucky we would get 10-15 good sized suckers. Usually around 3 pounds or so but occasionally up to 8 lbs. Once we got a 6lb rainbow this way. We got a few carp but they are really really fast. Suckers were used by My parents and grandparents to fertilize rose bushes and grape vines being no good to eat. I have always heard they weren’t edible but have never put the theory to the test. We never did get around to finding out if our method was legal or not because, well we were kids thats why.
I had heard that carp were not good to eat. Then one day our family was invited over to The Tabatas house, friends of mine for a fine meal of blackened fish. It was absolutly delicious. Mrs. Tabata was a Japanese lady with relatives in the fishing comunity out on the coast. When my mom asked Mrs Tabata where she got the sea bass from she was stunned to learn that it was carp from the local lake. We had been throwing them back. We learned that Carp should come from cold water in the lake not the warm water of the river else they taste like a river bottom smells. Also avoid the carp on the clay bottom part of the lake as they taste muddy.
Still I’m not going to target suckers anytime soon.
Years ago I caught some suckers on the Weber River in Utah while fishing for whitefish. I used a small fly, maybe 12 or 14 can’t remember for sure as that was 50 years ago. But I do remember the fly was nothing more than a weighted one with yellow floss body & grizzly hackle.
Not much help but I do remember they put a bend in the rod.
Tim
“Fly Fishing, The Quiet Sport”… The Honorable, Sir Lord Jack Hise, KICKS HIS TROUT and now we learn, that “GnuBee gill nets with chicken wire”. “The Quiet Sport”!?
I was a “Kaboom Jockey”, in 'Nam, maybe if I could get my hands on some c-4…?
I wonder, if “Detonate and Release” is legal in Oregon, for Trout and Steelhead?
I’ve caught suckers on beadhead nymphs many times. The only thing you gotta do is get the fly ON the bottom. They won’t come up for it like a trout will, as far as I have ever seen. But they eat bugs just like trout.
I tried a beadhead nymph and had it bouncing on the bottom. Guess I’ll try ii again.
Worms yes, But the end to use is the light colored end of the worm…Lighter colored nymphs work well…Those packaged cheese balls…the bait kind…work extremely well…Long ago…before my foray into fly fishing…a friend and I sat side by side on a small stocked stream here in the area…fishing in a hole the size of a bathtub…he used all manner of baits…and all I had were the cheese balls…he caught trout after trout…I caught sucker after sucker…we switched baits…He still caught trout after trout…and I still caught sucker…Was fine by me though…as the sucker were huge!!!and fought like there was no tomorrow!
Those bi color brass bead in the center Sanjuan worms work great also!
I caught a 19" sucker while steelhead fishing last week. Pulled drag out very nicely indeed and was a riot on the 7 wt. Would have been a handful in the rapid water that I was fishing with a 3 wt. This one hit a chartreusse streamer.
Rick
I’ve caught two suckers while flyfishing. Odd looking fish. One 12"er on a “Crystal Meth” (egg pattern fly) in a small stream, and one that was around 20-22" in the upper Niagara River. That one hit a gold beadhead olive crystal bugger. To this day, that was one of the most fightinest fish I’ve caught on a fly rod (5wt) It stripped line and jumped several times, like a SM bass. If I was targeting them I’d fish something buggy looking on the bottom. Maybe even sight fish for them. I’ve never, and will never eat one from my neck of the woods, but I’ve heard that ones caught in the spring time from clean waters are delicious.
Tom.
Big Bad Wulff,
I’m wondering what species of sucker you’re after.
I used to catch white suckers on worms in the spring in a local creek. When summer came though the suckers quit biting on worms. They were still there, we caught them while seining for minnows, but worms were off the menu.
watched a guy catch 3 suckers in 15 minutes using a beadhead gold ribbed hares ear. no luck for me
I catch them all the time (while fishing for other species). They mostly hit when I’m using scud patterns. I’ve caught them on Zug Bugs, as well. They are definitly not bad eating, if you catch one big enough to be worth it.
We eat carp a lot. Here is a tip for you. If you catch a carp from questionable water (too warm, muddy, etc…), simply put them in your bathtub with clean water, feed them corn and change 1/2 of the water every day for 3 days. Then they will be ‘cleaned out’ and ready to prepare. We do it all the time.
UMMMM…what do you do for a bath for those three days gig?