A Curious Case of Recapture

If you are on the water all the time, interesting occurrences are bound to find you. On of the many possible interesting occurrences that may happen to a catch and release fisherman is the recapture of a fish. It happens a lot, actually, if you frequent the same bodies of water. Something far less frequent is recapturing the same fish in a different body of water. That happened to me the other day.

A coupe weeks ago I caught this ugly broodstock rainbow in my home river. It took a sculpin, very likely in the same pool into which it was stocked. Hoping to get it to leave that pool I released it in the riffle downstream.

On Monday I fished the big river my home stream flows into with mice and streamers, hoping for some large trout and hopefully some smallmouth. I didn't catch any smallmouth. I did catch an 18 inch brookie and missed a 24-26 inch brown. Late in the evening, just as I was loosing light, I hooked a large rainbow. When I got it to me, I said aloud "well I'll be damned". It was the same rainbow I had caught just weeks earlier, More than a mile away and in a different river entirely. It is one thing to catch the same fish in the same lie or the same pool twice, it is another thing entirely to catch it in a different stream. Is it surprising that it moved that far? No. Trout will move much more than that in even shorter periods of time. But the fact that it encountered it again so far away, that is something unusual. A real needle in a haystack type occurrence.