Rivers and Trout Big and Small

I like to go out and hone my skills before any big trip, especially with trout. This is particularly paramount before my upcoming trip because it was best for us (my dad and I) to ship our gear to our destination before hand. For the first time in my life I'm going to be flying to get to my destination. Montana. Oh yeah. This one has been a long time coming.

Anyway, I wanted to get a little bit of practice in before going to the mountain west. On Thursday I fished my home river. This time of year is odd there. The fishing is probably the toughest it can be here, excepting winter ice lock and drought conditions. The water can be flowing very well and at the perfect temperature, I still struggle to locate good numbers and good sizes of wild browns. Often though this is when the less common brookies come out of the woodwork. That didn't happen this time. Salmon parr and small browns provided some practice with attractor dries and small streamers.

This morning I joined Mike Carl on a morning trip to the Farmington. We had chosen a time frame after some rain passed over a less convenient nocturnal time window before the rain. In retrospect, we almost certainly missed an excellent bite before the frontal passage. We got on the river well before sunrise and both fished different methods that should have produced. They didn't, almost certainly because the bite window had come and gone well before we got there. It wasn't until the sky started to brighten that I moved the first fish, on a fly I tied with a combination of traits from Joe Cermele's Master Splinter and Jackie Treehorn's Dirty Rat. I dub the, the Marabou Mouse. The fish I moved probably wasn't big, because I heard but didn't feel the take. A large taker is often the opposite: felt but not heard. 

I then bounced between fishing a Sparkle Minnow and a pair of nymphs, with no interest on either. Eventually I threw on a more neutrally buoyant articulated fly. On the first cast it got slammed pretty much at the rod tip. On the fifth cast I hooked and landed a handsome young wild brown. Then, back where we started, I got the best streamer take I've had in the Farmington in a long time. Lots of the trout there are, well, sissies. They grab and nip rather than slam. This guy slammed. He was a big fat survivor strain fish. No elastomer, just a clipped adipose. 

So I had one really solid fish on the morning, certainly no 20 incher but nice fat brown. Mike decided to show me some new water. I am never one to refuse to fish a new place, I was into the idea immediately. I already new the section we were going to had big fish potential, though undoubtedly it would hold fewer trout than many parts of the river. You know what? Those are the pieces I like most. I tend to believe that the biggest trout live where there aren't as many trout. And in time, this stretch would prove to be some place I have to fish again. 

I got a solid off hits right away, mostly I think mid sized rainbows. Eventually I got one pinned and landed it, a crisp and clean holdover. 

There seemed to be a pod of fish hanging around right where we started. I caught that bow, hooked and lost one other, and got two smallmouth there. I also missed an exceptionally large smallie and lost a questionable fish. The take and late hookset felt like I may have fouled the fish. The brief fight also indicated that either it was excessively big, or snagged. I'll never know for sure, but I'm sticking with snagged fish because that's the type I'd rather have had come off. 

Working upstream though I had a take for which there was no question: it was excessively big. It was a little unexpected. I was twitching my streamer in front of a partially submerged log that was being bonced up and down by the force of the current. I thought it would be odd for a trout to tolerate lying close something moving constantly and making noise, but a large, very thick, kyped up buck rose up and shadowed the fly for five feet up and across stream in heavy current, tip of his snout just glued to the tail of that streamer. Do you know how many times a legitimately large wild brown like this actually eat the big streamer after a follow of this kind? In my experience it is very uncommon. This one broke the rule and slammed the fly hard. I set as well as I could, and was treated to four of five seconds of violent thrashing, the big trout sending spray high into the air, before the line went slack. My heart sank. I had to take a short. There wasn't really much I could do in that scenario. But as anyone that plays the game of big trout on large streamers knows, missing and loosing fish is to be expected and, if you know it couldn't be avoided, not to be sweated. I continued working the waters with even more focus and intent than I had before because I now didn't just have a hunch, I was certain there were big fish here and that my method was the right one. 

Time and energy were not on our side though. I got one smaller brown in a pool tailout before succumbing to my lack of sleep. It is rare that I am the one to reel up first, today I did so.