Kokanee (& Trout) In The Dark

As an obsessive nighttime angler, I'm constantly looking to d to my repertoire. One thing I've done very little of is target trout in stillwaters at night. Here in CT, many of our stillwater fisheries are composed of stocked trout with very poor holdover rates, so that makes them generally uninteresting to me. There are some lakes with a half decent holdover rate but most take some travel. There's also some lakes with other species of interest. It was kokanee that got me fairly intrigued to try one particular stillwater.

Kokanee are landlocked sockeye salmon. They were brought top CT in the 1940's to build a recreational fishery. Why the state of CT is expending resources on this only lightly fished species that isn't native is beyond me, but at least kokanee aren't going to spread far and wide. In fact, landloacked alewives, also a non-native, have almost completely wiped out kokanee fisheries in Ct in the past. Kokanee have an affinity for nocturnal activity, though kokanee feeding is focused on zooplankton. They're essentially a salmonid that filter feeds... not quite like menhaden or American shad, but they focus on such tiny food items when foraging. Transferring their nocturnal feeding habits over to the spawning run- when the strike mainly out of aggression -doesn't necessarily follow. But at least in my mind, nocturnal is nocturnal and I should be able to get some to strike. If not, rainbows would be around the same areas. 

I set out on a brightly moonlit night with a plan in mind. I'd fish two methods, both with relatively small and bright colored flies as that's what has worked for kokanee in the past. I'd start out fishing them under indicators. With the aid of the moon, as well as nearby artificial light, I'd be able to see the indicator drop if I was getting takes. If that failed, I'd slow pull the same flies as well as some streamers with a figure eight retrieve

Upon arrival to the spot, I could actually see the schools of fish. There were huge numbers of kokanee out there, as well as loads of trout. It soon proved very easy to get the trout to take. Me indicator dropped time and time again.

The trout seemed to have very little preference in the way of flies. I caught them on Green Weenies, eggs, Walt's Worm with pink collar, Sawyer's Pheasant Tail, and small buggers. I kept switching mostly to try to pull out a kokanee, but it wasn't proving to be especially easy. Even on the best of days they test a good angler's resolve. Each Pacific salmon has a different attitude during their spawning run., and it differs place to place as well. Kings in New York are heavily pressured and often hard to convince to snap at something, which is why many anglers fish eggs, bits of foam, and smaller flies with immense amounts of weight. This differs from large and less pressured river chinooks in Alaska, which are caught on large flies and lures. It also differs from less pressured water elsewhere in the great lakes. Coho, wherever they are, seem to be on the aggressive side of the spectrum, as do pinks. Chum salmon are definitely quite inclined to take large streamers and lures. Kokanee seem to be one of the finickiest. This results in a lot of people intentionally snagging them, which is just ridiculous. Its also illegal, and I call the TIP hotline any time I see it happening. As should you. Anglers often complain about poachers in CT, and yes ENCON is understaffed and won't always respond, but you should still call. The more calls get made the more poachers will get caught. Please do your part. 

I, of course, was just patiently waiting for a kokanee to actually grab a fly. It took a couple hours before one finally did, but it was a wonderful proof of concept. I could, in fact, catch a kokanee at night. The first one sunk the indicator just like the trout had been doing. The fly of choice? The good old Green Weenie.

That wasn't really the start of a pattern though. Kokanee are moody and erratic, and I often get them seemingly at random. Indeed I ended up with three that night in five hours of fishing, and each was on a different fly. The first was the only one to take under the indicator. The second took on a slow retrieve and the third took and egg on the fall. 

I lost a couple couple kokanee that I clearly saw as well, and a few that may have been. largely though the night was a very trouty one. I must have caught between 35 and 40 of them, and I even specifically tried to avoid them at times in hopes of picking up more salmon. As it turns out, that nighttime indicator strategy in particular is wildly effective. I've considered fishing indicators at night in rivers as well and this really did some convincing. I've lightly fiddled with the idea in the past, putting glow in the dark tape on indicators, but it never really got me anywhere I think its time to in some glowing thingamabobbers. 

The night game is such a fascinating one. I've always felt that it builds on an anglers understanding of the water they're fishing. If the right casts and presentations can be made or even things as simple as getting to the productive locations can be accomplished without aid of the light of day, it builds your understanding of the water. But something I sometimes forget, and likely equally important: fish behave differently at night. Fishing in the dark builds your understanding of your query as well. I feel I have a better understanding of landloacked sockeye now having caught them at night. 

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Franky, Geof, Luke, Noah, Justin, Sean, Tom, Mark, Jake, and Chris for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version.

Swinging New York Salmon

Spey casting for Great Lakes salmon and steelhead is kind of a fools errand. The fish aren't like native salmon, they leave a freshwater lake and enter a freshwater river... by the time they get in front of anglers they've mostly already gone though their transition into spawn-focused automatons. There's a reason you can find videos galore of Alaskan cohos smashing topwater flies and none of that from the Great Lakes. They're long done with that by the time they come in. There's also to many damn people. Even in the Douglaston Salmon Run. You can't really rotate when there's a dozen nymphers standing in the run, flogging the same water for hours. The fish also see more flies than any fish should ever have to see. If they were actually native, I'd have a huge problem with the ethics of it, but since they're introduced my problem with it is completely selfish- I want to fish for them the way I want to fish for them, and that just happens to be spey casting which requires room and the ability to cover water. 

So, all that said, there's no other way I'll fish for Great Lakes salmon and steelhead. Even if it's the hardest way. Hey, at least I know my fish ate when I hook one (yeah, I went there). There's very little better than that tight line grab, even if it only happens a few time in a whole day of fishing. 

Rick invited Charlie and I to go to Pulaski and fish the Douglaston Salmon Run again this fall. The weather was very different this go around. It was excessively warm for mid October, and that negatively impacted the fishing. We could easily have wet waded the water was so warm. The kings were around but a lot were entering the river less than fresh. Steelhead were far from numerous and mostly holding in very fast water. And there were of course lots of guys on the run as that week is often the peak, so space to swing was at a premium. I was lucky enough a few times to be able to rotate with a couple other spey casters or have enough water to myself to cover a bit of it before another angler slipped in in front of me, but I got a bit less lucky than last year. 

The fish I wanted most was an adult coho. I'd gotten my first swing steelie last fall and some juvenile cohos this winter. I really hoped for a big, chrome, fired up coho. I ended up getting just that. The fish ate a size 4 Ally's Shrimp and put on a fantastic fight. It was also properly chrome, more chrome I'd ever personally seen before. 

The next couple of fish were all ugly kings. One on an olive and black Intruder, one on a large grey Bugger, one on a Gartside Soft Hackle Streamer. They were in various states of decay. The freshest put up a ridiculous fight with loads of jumps before bolting downriver an forcing me to really reef on it to land it in a waste deep bank trough. 

The to most unusual and unexpected fish of the trip was a native species, a Northern hogsucker that grabbed a blue charm of all things. I love these goofy suckers and their odd black lip coloration. This was the first large one I've caught. My lifer was very small, caught in Western Pennsylvania last fall. This one was much more impressive.

For he next couple days, all I was able to get grabs from was kings, and not many kings at that. A couple of them were pretty seriously big at least. They weren't the best looking fish though. 

Rick and Charlie weren't spey casting and they weren't having fast fishing either. Charlie ended up being the hot hand though with unquestionably the best fish of the trip, and possibly a fish of a lifetime: a gorgeous chrome buck steelhead, a huge one, that took him on a hell of a ride. That's certainly the sort of fish I'd have loved to run into. Of course, I'll have more opportunities. I don't get out there much but I'm slowly figuring things out and refining my technique and fly selection. How many more times will I put up with all the nonsense? Probably way too many times. 

Until next time, 

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, C, Franky, Geof, Luke, Streamer Swinger, and Noah for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version.

A Surprise Lifer In Western NY

If it hadn't been for one unexpected turn, my last trip for steelhead would have been completely disappointing. Actually it wasn't completely unexpected, but if Noah and I both weren't the sort to stray away from the target species when a viable opportunity to catch a new species presented itself we wouldn't have had this shot. The progeny of pacific salmon that successfully spawn in the Salmon River can be found sporadically throughout the river. We happened to find schools of them in a series of loosely connected puddles adjacent to the river. They were actually rising, and luckily Noah has one small mosquito dry fly with him. With a very poorly tapered leader, that little dry, and Noah's 9 weight rod, we actually managed to catch a couple. A bit of quick identification work proved them to be cohos, and so not only was Noah's a lifer (because he'd never caught any Pacific salmon species) but mine was as well. 

Lifelist Fish #178, Coho salmon, Oncorhynchus kisutch. Rank: Species.

Those little buggers were actually pretty cool. It was almost like fishing for wild brook trout except they were far less skittish. In fact, they at times appeared to spook and darted around as though they had been, but continued to take the fly aggressively. They were also beautiful little fish, with bright oranges on their fins and well defined blue parr marks. I'd certainly like to catch some adults, but getting these little wild parr was pretty cool. Not to mention, it had been months since I'd caught a lifer. Ironically, the previous had been another Pacific salmon and in the same river. In between I'd had to take swordspine snook off my life list as it turned out the tiny unusual looking snook I'd thought was a swordspine was actually a fat snook. Though my focus on acquiring new species has waned a bit recently, there's another lifer I've added to my list that I'll be really excited to share very soon. 

Until next time, 

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, C, Franky, Geof, Luke, and Noah for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version. 

Edited by Cheyenne Terrien

Salmon River Salmon and Steelhead: Becoming a Snob

Lake Ontario's native Atlantic salmon went extinct in the 1800's, for much the same reasons salmon all over the East Coast were suffering: dams, pollution, and overfishing. As seems to be human nature given just about any and all similar cases turn out the same, those in charge of such things immediately started trying to replace those Atlantics with something different. These attempts included the first stockings of Pacific salmon in Lake Ontario. These early attempts to establish cohos and chinooks failed, but hope was never truly lost, and when the extirpation of lake trout in the middle of the 20th century resulted in a huge boom and overpopulation of alewives the stockings again commenced. By 1974 a run had been established in New York's Salmon River. 

The early years of this fishery were, to put it politely, an absolute shit-show. People didn't believe the fish would voluntarily take a lure or bait, so they deliberately snagged them. Though already illegal and widely considered unfair chase on most waters, it remained common practice on Lake Ontario tributaries where salmon runs occurred until 1995. Fear of economic impacts to the now wildly popular fisheries was surpassed by the overwhelmingly obvious problems with such an unethical practice. Illegal activity, fist fights, harvesting salmon eggs for profit, and other such behavior were rampant. The snagging ban inevitably did cause a decrease in fishing effort but over time, as people discovered that the fish could indeed be caught on flies and bait if targeted the right way, it once again boomed. It is estimated that $201,000,000 is spent by anglers fishing the Salmon River annually. And though things have gotten more civilized, there is still a lot of buffoonery. My friend Rick invited me and fellow fish head Charlie to join him on a trip during the peak of the salmon run. We'd spend one day fishing the public water and two on the private Douglaston Salmon Run, giving us the chance to see both the chaotic and the more civilized side of this fishery. 

When Rick and I went to fish winter steelhead, we'd stayed well upriver, in and around Altmar. This time the idea was to fish further down where the fish were freshest. Not far above the Douglaston, Town Pool is one of the first holding spots above the private water. We just wanted to watch there, as this spot is rarely anything less than pure chaos. It was a fun show to watch, though I'm certainly not the type to want to take part in this sort of fishing. Fish were snagged, lines were crossed, and it was the furthest thing from socially distant. But the behemoth fish we could see in the waters below shed light on why it was this way. For most of these people, chances to catch fish of this size (in a small river no less) don't come that often and the allure surpasses the rest of the experiences that would make someone like myself turn their nose up to it. 

Snobbery, or some semblance of it, had already set in. 

We drove around a bit before settling in to fish at Pineville. I was eager to do some wandering and walk to try to get away from crowds. It turned out that this was possible, but it wasn't easy to find water that had both fish and less people. I know I never found any water that had both some fish and no people. But I did find some and less, and that seems to be about the best you can do.

My expectation were low that first day, but I tried a bit of everything some swinging big flies with my spey setup to nymphing and dredging eggs to sight fishing with small streamers. I hooked one fish while sight fishing, and it wasn't the one I was targeting but the more beat up individual it was next to. It made an unexpected move and I suddenly found myself attached to it by the dorsal fin. Try as I might, I couldn't roll cast the fly off of it, but the fish was fresh enough to put up a solid fight so I decided to use this as an opportunity to decipher the limitations of my tackle against these fish. I put as much pressure on the fish as I was willing to plucked my woolly bugger out as soon as it got close enough. From then on I decided to break fish off that were clearly snagged. 

When I made it back to where Rick and Charlie were, Rick was hooked up. I stood on the bridge to watch and shoot photos. Eventually the fish came unpinned, unfortunately, and by that time we were hungry and decided to head out

We got a pizza at Paulanjo's in Pulaski than headed to the hotel and eked out what precious little sleep we could. In the morning, we went to the Douglaston. After New York senator Doug Barclay got sick of fisherman trespassing and behaving despicably, on his large property on the lower reaches of the Salmon River, he turned his property into a private, regulated fishery. Anglers who are willing to can pay for the privilege of smaller crowds and better behavior on prime water under the watchful eye of the Douglaston's river keepers, who make sure everything is on the up n' up. 

I very quickly came to the conclusion that I'd never fish the public water on the Salmon during the mid fall season again. Yet another level of snobbery had been reached.

Rick and Charlie decided to settle in at one of the major pools, but the wandering itch was bugging me and wander I did. I spent some time in the riffles trying to get some chinooks holding in the pockets to react to flies, but I inevitably found my camera better at capturing these fish than my fly rods.

I wandered my way downriver before settling in to fish hard in a stretch that looked good but wasn't especially busy. I started out bouncing heavy flies, doing what basically everyone else was doing, and kept doing that for a while, through a couple missed fish and a couple intentional break-offs of fouled fish. As the day wore on though I began to bore of it. In time the pool cleared out nearly entirely, and I switched to the spey rod, started at the head, and began to cast and swing. 

10 casts in, my intruder got smoked. I swung and whiffed, and a chrome steelhead did one cartwheel in retaliation. I swore under my breath and my arms fell to my sides. That I had not expected, not so soon. That moment right there sold me completely. I was swinging for the rest of the trip. I felt affirmed half an hour later when a big dark king smoked my weird olive and purple fly and put up an admirable fight. It was my first chinook, my first Lake Ontario salmon, and my first salmonid approaching 20 pounds. 

Lifelist fish #178: Chinook salmon, Oncorhynchus tshawytscha. Rank Species

I had a couple more wonderful experiences with chinooks that day and the following. Very few of them ended with a fish to hand. The largest fish I hooked took a big yellow Gartside softackle streamer around sunset and was likely in the 40lb class. It roared off, leaving the run I hooked it in, the leaving the pool below it, then entering the next long run below that before turning, jumping, landing on my leader, and breaking off. I felt pretty under-gunned with my 11'6" 8wt. The next day a fish of similar size gave me the same sort of battle but this time I landed, unfortunately it turned out to be hooked outside the mouth, so though it was a gorgeous quite fresh beast of a fish I didn't photograph it. The first fish I'd hooked that day was also the same sort of gigantic male, but not on for very long and did definitely eat the fly, a huge pink marabou spey fly. After doing some crazy frantic runs; charging up, down, across and back but never for than 30 feet; it launched completely out of the water sideways and threw the fly. The image of a 35-40lb chinook two feet above the river, spray sparkling like shards of glass haloing it, and my fly falling out of its big toothy maw will forever be burned in my brain. 

Later on the second day I got the freshest king I'd been able to land. He was a little fellow, and almost fooled me into thinking he was a big brown trout. It was a pretty cool fish nonetheless. 

The fish that made the trip for me though came in the first evening on the Douglaston. I was working a bend very thoroughly, trying to drive one of the big kings or cohos I'd seen in there crazy to the point of snapping at my irritating white and grizzly swing fly. That didn't happen. Instead, my fly got crushed at the end of the swing, and a silver bullet came flying out of the water when I set the hook. It was a steelhead, a chrome psychopath, and it came upstream and went right by me spending more time in the air than in the water. My heart was pounding. The rest of the fight was pretty much a blur but I do know I was utterly floored by how hard this fish was fighting for its size. By some miracle, I got it to hand, and couldn't stop uttering expletives under my breath. This was my first fresh steelhead, my first steelhead on a streamer, and my first on the swing. It completed my transition to snobbery. My days of nymphs, split shot, and dredging up Great Lakes salmon and steelhead are probably over. It had never sat well with me anyway, I gravitated towards spey fishing in the same way I was drawn to fishing for Atlantic salmon and sea run trout with traditional flies and methods. It felt like it did the fish justice, as if the fish were made for the methods instead of the other way around. 

I'd never be so bold as to suggest superiority, I don't care how you catch your salmon and steelhead so long as it falls within the bounds of what is legal and fair-chase. Bait, center pinning, chuck and duck... they're all completely valid and ethical when done right. But for me, I can nymph trout, fallfish, bass, suckers, and other such species. I would like to swing my flies without additional weight for my migratory fish. It just feels right to me. That was my takeaway from this trip. I became a spey snob. I can't wait to make a steelhead trip and swing flies for hours upon hours for scant few 

takes. I really can't.

Rick with a big hen chinook that took an egg.

It took much too long for me to experience the Pulaski salmon run. It's such a huge part of Northeast fishing culture that one can't can't live here, be serious about fishing, and get away without making the trip at least once. There wasn't anyone I'd rather have taken the trip with than Rick. Though Charlie and I had never been, Rick has a long history with this fishery. He knows it well, he's seen it morph and change a bit over the years, and he's caught a lot of salmon and steelhead there. Charlie was also great company. I'm sure the three of us will fish the Salmon River again sometime, Covid willing.

Until next time,

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, C, and Franky for supporting this blog on Patreon.

CT Kokanee on the Fly

Noah and I are running out of local lifers, especially large local lifers. Especially in freshwater where we really had only a handful of micros and endangered species (which we don't target, for obvious reasons). The only freshwater "gamefish" I had left to catch in CT were tiger musky and kokanee, Noah only had kokanee since hasn't counted hybrids. We had to get kokanee this year. Last year we tried one time. It was too late, too cold, too windy, too snowy, on and on and on. It was just an extremely poor fishing day. Our only day targeting kokanee this year was the polar opposite, an absolutely lovely fall day to be up in the Northwestern CT hills. Now, I guess I should give some background for those of you that don't know what a kokanee is. Kokanee are the landlocked for of sockeye salmon, having naturally diverged roughly 15,000 years ago when melting glaciers facilitated their geographic isolation from sea run sockeye. Sockeye are a strange salmonid, continuing to feed on zooplankton almost exclusively through their entire lives. As such they don't rise to hatches or feed on baitfish, and the fishing methods used to catch kokanee outside of spawning season can be quite unique. Like their other Pacific salmon brethren though, they let their guard down during the spawning run and can be aggravated into striking flies and lures. Also like Pacific salmon, when they start the spawning process, that's the beginning of their end. They die after they spawn. CT DEEP maintains a small number of stillwater kokanee fisheries through capturing adults before they spawn then stocking the offspring back into those bodies of water. They likely wouldn't produce a wild fishery on their own, but it is interesting to have these fish available to us. 

 Noah and I wanted to time our trip to coincide with the spawn, preferably fairly early when the fish are the most fired up and easily triggered into striking. I started to get a little nervous when we circumnavigated the lake and saw only two carcasses that had been there a while. It wasn't until we got all the way around the lake and back to where we'd started that we found a bunch of kokanee. Noah hooked and boated one one his first cast into the school, of course it flipped right out of the kayak and we then both struggled for a long time to land one. Getting them to strike wasn't actually that difficult. Changing tactic frequently and just sticking to it got results. The fish would seemingly ignore a presentation for a long time before suddenly slamming it, or just progressively get visibly more and more irritated before snapping. We both got tons of takes, but a combination of factors including the small size of the fish, their jumping, and their tooth filled narrow mouths made them very hard to hook and keep hooked. Almost no takes resulted in hooked fish, and most of the fish we hooked threw the lure or fly. To make things even more frustrating, the fish were grouped tightly and moving about, so they often snagged themselves. I stuck mostly with barbless hooks so I could shake off snagged fish. Evidently people are going specifically to snag these fish. While we were there a man came along, snagged the biggest female there, and then kept it. Snagging is obviously low, but keeping a rotting, spawning salmon is just stupid. Someone also pulled up next to us and asked "snaggin anything?". People either aren't patient enough or just don't know that these fish will mouth the right presentations. Or they don't care, and that's honestly probably the case. Noah and I could have snagged every kokanee in this place twice pretty easily and then taken tons of photos to share all over social media. But what really would the point of that be?
No, we were struggling to catch any at all, but if I was going to catch a kokanee it had to eat the fly.

And lucky for me one did, I hooked it, it stayed on through a couple of jumps, and it didn't shake the hook until I had it in shallow water where I could keep it from making a break for it. I edged on step closer to my goal of reaching #150 before the end of 2019.

Lifelist fish #142, sockeye salmon (kokanee salmon), Oncorhynchus nerka, Rank: species

Noah eventually got one too, and we soon left those obnoxious little demons to their business. Honestly, I'll need an entire year to forget how frustrating they were to want to go try to catch one again. I'd love to try to get them in a river, that seems like a lot more fun, but I'm fairly certain that closest that kind of fishery exists in Colorado.
So, now I'm down to a dismally low number of local species I still need to catch. This is getting hard. Time to move!
Until next time.

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, john, Elizabeth, Chris, Brandon, and Christopher, for supporting this blog on Patreon.

The Search for Landlocked Sockeye

Sockeye are kind of the weirdo among their other salmonid brethren. It doesn't look out of place in the mix with other Pacific salmon. And it doesn't behave particularly differently either. Except from one glaring oddity. Oncorhynchus nerka eats zooplankton. Virtually every juvenile salmon and trout does, but none maintain their affinity for dining on tiny life forms quite like sockeye salmon do in their adult ocean going form. Like Atlantic salmon, sockeye can survive just fine as a landlocked population. This form of the species is called kokanee.

CT has some kokanee, in just three bodies of water. Two have good fisheries, one hopefully will in years to come but doesn't yet. Throughout most of their life cycle they are nearly impossible to catch on the fly. But when they spawn, they get snappy and may hit small streamers, San Juan Worms, and eggs. It's a short window, like all Pacific salmon sockeye are semelparous, spawning only once and dying immediately thereafter. So when I saw that kokanee were being caught last week in varying degrees of decay, I knew I wouldn't have long to attempt to add one to me life list this year. Noah and I made our plans. Hopefully we wouldn't miss them.

What we definitely didn't expect though, was snow.

The lakes that have kokanee in CT don't have any significant streams feeding them to get a spawning run of sorts, which is unfortunate because that would be really darn cool. Instead they attempt to spawn along lake shorelines that have a little bit of current and the right kind of gravel. So that's where we were going to focus out efforts. In our first spot we saw fish rise, probably trout, and I thought I saw a few red forms swimming around but couldn't be sure of it. We got cold hands and no hook ups, so we went to get some hand warmers. After a little while this spot lost it's shine and we wanted to try somewhere else. Unfortunately that somewhere else was somewhere I knew even less about.

Pheasant

That was definitely less productive in terms of finding anything that felt remotely like the right water for kokanee. I caught one perch before we gave up for more familiar fish, in hopes of just catching something remotely interesting. Another big lake, another unfamiliar kind of fishing. Trout and salmon in bigger lake is something I rarely ever do, so this was all largely experimental. We found some fish at creek mouths. Rainbows, not the big brown we were expecting and hoping for.

We decided to give our first spot one final go, one last chance at a kokanee. A few casts in I felt a pull and looked up to see a flash of deep red. Then it was gone.
So close yet so far. Till next year, kokanee.

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Thanks for joining the adventure, and tight lines.