ON LAKE HURON, Mich. — This was getting interesting.

Jigging Mike Milican had hooked a nice steelhead just above the Huron River spillway at Flat Rock, and the fish quickly dropped over the edge of the dam and into the boiling froth below.

Not to worry. The Taylor, Mich., angler reached under the covered bridge and handed his rod to another fisherman, who held it until Milican could run around the end, grab it and play an 8-pound steelhead into the net.

"I got three the other day, all on the float and jig," said Milican, one of a dozen regulars fishing the Huron on this day. "I keep telling people that float fishing is better than what they're doing, but not very many of them do it."

Float fishing is just starting to take off in the Great Lakes region. Developed in Great Britain, it was refined in Ontario by anglers who found it was ideal for bigger species like steelhead, and it has recently developed a following among steelhead and salmon anglers on the Pacific Coast.

I've been doing a lot of float fishing myself this spring, and it has been a lot more productive than the bottom-bouncing techniques I normally use for steelhead and river walleyes.

My favorite technique is using a centerpin reel, which looks like an oversize fly reel and is so perfectly machined that if I lay it on its side and give it a hard spin, it won't stop for more than a minute.

With a 13-foot rod, I can flip a float into the current, and the line will melt off the reel effortlessly and present the bait with the most perfect drag-free float possible.

But a float reel isn't a necessity. You can fish floats with a long rod (9 feet or more) and a spinning reel or, even better, a bait-casting reel.

Spinning reels work well in places such as the Huron at Flat Rock, where anglers need to get a drift of 20 to 30 feet. But in other situations, including fishing for steelhead or stream trout or smallmouth bass on a big river, it's possible to get a drift of 200 to 300 feet, and line comes off a bait caster much smoother than off a spinning reel.

A rod 12 feet or longer offers three great advantages. First, it lets the angler fish deeper water by casting a terminal rig with the lure or bait hanging 8 to 10 feet below a float.

Second, it lets the angler mend line as the float moves downstream or even hold most of the line off the water when fishing a very short drift.

Third, long rods can be built with limber tips and stiff butt sections, letting the angler put pressure on a fish when necessary but still protecting the leaders used in most float fishing.

Most of the walleyes that spawn in the Huron will be gone by the time the inland season for them opens on April 26, but it's still a lot of fun to catch and release them, especially on light float-fishing tackle that turns every walleye into a game fish.

And once the suckers and shad start running strongly in a week or so, you'd be hard-pressed to find any fishing that's more fun for kids than watching that float dip under and hooking up with a good-sized fish.

The biggest problem has been finding purpose-designed float rods, or any kind of good float tackle. A few tackle shops carry 9- to 10-foot spinning rods, but you rarely see any longer than that, and 12-foot rods designed for bait-casting reels are non-existent.