Tom,
This is a tough time of year to be starting out. May and June are going to treat you a lot better! Til then though, you'll learn a lot and probably catch a few. It's just you'll catch more and more consistantly when the weather gets nicer and bugs are more active on the stream. My "short list" for winter, with an eye toward steelhead and trout:
egg patterns: glo bugs, blood dots and/or sucker spawn. size 14 for trout, size 14 and larger for steelhead
wooleybuggers: white. white with some flash. black. black with some flash (esp if you can get red) in 14 and 8. In the Spring, you'll want brown and olive too.
crayfish: fresh stocked trout seem to like small crayfish patterns, dunno why
streamers: the wooleybuggers should have you covered but in clear water you may want some mickeyfins, size 14 & 8. With the wooleybuggers and streamers, you really want to hit pocket water. Present them just about anyway you want, but target undercut banks, root balls at the base of trees, pocket water and undercut rocks. If you ever canoed, cast to anything you'd have tried to stay away from in your boat.
nymphs: small (like 14 to 18) black stoneflies (I'd say big ones too, but you have the black wooleybuggers., zebra midges, princenymphs (14) and chamois worms.
You probably don't need ALL of these, but you may want to build up to a selection of sizes and patterns over time. Flies from a good shop will run you $2 to $3, and so it can get a little pricey when you start getting a dozen patterns in a dozen sizes! :-o Focus on a few sizes at first, and get one or two bright attractor patterns and then one or two dark, realistic patterns. If you get them half a dozen at a time, you can build up a good collection of patterns before you realize how expensive this hobby is! :-D
