A Big Trout on a Mouse

With markedly less rain lately, many local streams have dropped to ideal night fishing levels. Warm daytime temperatures have also helped spur on good fishing between sunset and sunrise. And with a very very wet spring behind us, amphibians and small rodents have been everywhere. That is a recipe for productivity with big dry flies, poppers, gurglers, and mice, which, although very fun, is rarely the best way to catch numbers or size at night. Tell me I need to rely on one fly to catch a trout after dark, and it just isn't going to be a mouse. Sorry, mouse freaks, but if you're a one trick pony, you will never really reach the kind of level of success the best night trout anglers do.

That being said, when the conditions line up, I will fish mice. And for the last week the conditions have been very right. I've spent a few full nights (dusk till dawn) and some evening shifts winging both mice and large Harvey Pushers, with lots of fish on both but particularly good success with mice. This is in strong contrast to years when I've utterly failed to move fish at night with mice but absolutely hammered them with small flies and subsurface presentations.

One of many healthy, dark rainbows on a pusher. 

A mix of sulfur spinners and midges.

last year was a good mouse year on this water too, but I find that this year is less consistent. Lots of fish some nights, a few on others, fortunately never a skunk. Also inconsistent is the presentation  preferences. Last year I found that all I needed was the same slow strip, strip, pause... strip, strip, pause retrieve. This year if I don't do some experimentation I won't get as many fish. I've caught some fish stripping the fly straight downstream, some stripping straight up, some dead drifting, some on the swing, some on a fast, erratic two hand retrieve, some on a steady retrieve of two inch strips, and some on the same old two strips pause retrieve.

The light of a new day awakens the birds while I head home to get some sleep.

Honestly, the more changing I have to do throughout the night the less confident I am. So it's gotten to the same point at the end of each night mission recently... despite catching a ton of fish, I never really feel like I've gotten it dialed in to the optimal extent. That may surprise you, but my bar for success in night fishing is really high. I'm very used to catching a couple dozen fish a night and a handful of large-for-that-water trout. And, although that did happen on 2 of the last 7 nights I fished, I couldn't tell you why. So I've got some work to do.
 

Towards the end of one of the better night outing, at about 1:30 a.m, I came tight two strips into a 60ft cast down and across a very large, deep pool with a size 2 Master Splinter. I heard nothing, I just stripped and the fish was there. I set hard and immediately the fish came up and started thrashing. It was very clear that it was big. It didn't fight a whole lot, but then again I find that there's not much middle ground with trout at night: either they fight like hell or they give up easy. This 23 inch rainbow gave up easy.

It's kind of funny. Whenever you hear about night fishing for trout the target is always big browns, and that is for a reason. Browns are more carnivorous than rainbows and also see better in the dark. So it stands to reason that more big brown trout would be caught at night.
I am an exception to the rule. Both my biggest trout at night (wild, 30 something inches, Gallatin River), and on a mouse at night (this 23 inch CT broodstock) are rainbows. My only brown over 20 inches at night was just barely at night, during a green drake hatch on the Beaverkill. Why I haven't caught a big brown at night in the CT is really a interesting question. Partly it's the waters I fish, but there are plenty of big stocker browns here. There were certainly plenty of large browns in the Gallatin too, and yet somehow I found that monster rainbow that I absolutely did not feel I deserved.

Even though I got my biggest trout on a mouse that night, the highlight was an encounter with a bobcat. Large predator species move around remarkably quietly at night, and when I heard this guy coming down to the far bank I knew it was a larger animal precisely because it didn't sound big. One squirrel making its way back to its nest late sounds like what you'd probably imagine a gang of sasquatches running through the brush would sound like; but an actual sasquatch, or, rather, a bobcat, sounds about like the wind barely rustling the leaf litter on occasion. I turned on my white light, and sure enough, a beautiful, healthy looking young cat, bounded away from my up the bank. What an animal!

Last night I followed a possum on my bike. He didn't seem to want to leave the road, and it wasn't late enough that there wasn't the odd passing car, so I made sure he did leave it before I continued on my way. It's these things as much as the fish that make me perfectly happy to fish from 9:00pm to 5:00am. Night fishing is so much fun!

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