Brief Intermission

(Please play for duration of visit)

I will pick up the final segment of the Champlain adventure tomorrow, but for now, a brief intermission: Night fishing for trout is kind of happening right now. The mouse bite is good on my river. Quite good. And when the mouse bite is good it's what I'm going to do.

I tend to prefer the darkest nights for night fishing, regardless of species. It's nice to be able to see a lot of what's around you, yes. But fish don't feed at night because its bright out. My best nights targeting trout are the blackest, warmest, muggiest, buggiest nights. The water levels are typically low, maybe during the day the temperature peaked at a height that would make targeting trout questionable. As long as it is dark and gross and the water is low and just cold enough, that's when you need to get your butt to the river if you want to find a big nocturnal brown. 

I've said it before and I'll say it again, if you want to produce well at night, 

fish

really

really

slow.

Just twitch that mouse. Don't strip it like a streamer, don't swing it like a wet fly, don't rip it downstream. Mice suck at swimming, they can't go anywhere fast. Cast up and across, strip in two inches of line every four seconds, mend if you have to. 

What will always amaze me is how a sizable trout can eat a huge mouse with almost no sound at all in riffled water. Twitch.... Twitch.... Twitch.... 

Heavy, throbbing weight.

It's exciting fishing. Any cast in the right water could produce an absolutely massive trout. It took only the mere thought of catching a trout on a big rodent imitation to get me obsessed with this type of angling. God, I love it! 

Something I've noted this season is how many more browns I catch on mice at night in this river than rainbows and brookies. Initially that may not seem odd, browns are, to us easterners, the most frequently targeted trout with mice. But in the early spring when I use these flies during the day, this is how it works: the fish most likely to take a mouse presented to it is a tiger trout. Second, brook trout. Third, rainbow. Brown trout are fourth. Fourth. It is harder to get a stocked brown to eat a mouse in daylight than any other species or hybrid I have fished them for. I think this provides insight into how long it takes stocked trout to adjust. Right now, late June, the species have fallen into natural behaviors, the population has thinned and filled out, this is when stocked trout fishing is as close to wild as it could possibly be. Take the tactics that work on stocked trout here now and apply them on wild rivers and they will work.