Some Of The Prettiest Fish

 Alan, Kirk and I visited on of our favorite new spots today. The weather was gorgeous but very unusual for January. It felt and smelled like early spring. The brook trout were hungry. I took first blood with a very small fish on an elk hair caddis, but it was only seconds before Alan was hooked up with a fish significantly larger than mine.

I decided to wander off down stream. In a plunge pool where there is always a pile of fish I gave an ice dub bug a workout, pulling fish after fish out of the depths using a slow twitching drift. All told, after two visits to that pool, I pulled 19 brook trout out of it. One thing Kirk and I noticed and discussed as we were travelling between spots... a lot of the brook trout that come out of this stream are just drop dead gorgeous! Have a look at this one:

My biggest of the day was the lightly colored female below. I watched Kirk hook and loose a fairly substantial fish, and I had a few hits from a big brookie that seemed to want to steal my rod.

After thoroughly covering the first stretch of water and stopping for coffee we went to a stretch where the stream is larger and brown trout are the predominant salmonid. Peering into a deep, dark hole I did indeed spot a couple small stream leviathans, if you will; brown trout in excess of 15 inches. However all any of us managed to catch were fall fish, common shiners, and two suckers that I sight cast to with the Ausable Ugly.

Tomorrow I'm planning to fish some bigger water and hopefully it will result in some bigger trout.