You have to be a very patient person to swing for winter steelhead. It is fairly difficult and not the most efficient way to catch them on the fly. Me personally, swing for summers and nymph for winters. Anyways, to swing you'll need a floating line with interchangable sink tips (or a full sinking line). A 12' type III sink tip would probably be a good all around winter steelhead tip, but I'd recommend having a couple different sink rates in different lengths. What you want to do is cast straight across river or quarter down river, make ONE mend and let er go. The mistake I kept making when I was learning how to swing is making too many adjustments (mends) when the fly was suppose to be swinging. As far as how deep the fly is when swinging is multifactorial (sink tip rate, fly weight, speed of curent, etc.) and only experince can answer that. The best thing to do is go to the library and check out a fly-fishing steelhead book and then go try it out, but if you want to CATCH winters, instead of just fishing for them on the swing, I would peg a bead or nymph egg patterns. Anyways, I'll add to this later I gotta go...