25 Minutes, 4 Fish

I am one lucky SOB. I say that for numerous reasons, but one of the top reasons is that virtually whenever I want I can exit my front door and be on wild brook trout water in less than five minutes, walleye/bass/pickerel water in three minutes or ten minutes, and a variety of other multi-species water in two minutes to ten minutes. It's Heaven for a non-picky angler like myself.  But being able to get on a brook trout stream in five minutes is especially, well, special. There's been a little problem with the closest stream for the last few years though. It did not handle the drought years of 2015 and 2016 very well. The extent of the dewatering was horrible, in large part because of an extensive well system in the stream's headwaters. The oldest year classes got hit hard, really hard, and the number of fish I'd catch in a trip fell from 5-20 to 0-5. It was demoralizing to have this little gem of a suburban creek so devastated. Fortunately I found redds every fall. On those days I stopped making casts all together. Most of the time when I find brookies on redds in a stream I'll focus my efforts on the water where there can't be redds: Mud bottom, deep fast slots, and places with all-boulder substrate. Not all trout will spawn at the same time so I can still catch colored up fish without interrupting spawners. But in most of the streams I fish locally I couldn't even justify that approach. The populations needed the best chance possible to recuperate. The biggest trout I saw on redds in this nearby stream last fall were no bigger than 5 inches, most were 4.

Then there's 2018. One of the wettest years I've fished through. Stream beds were dramatically rearranged and all year there's been tons of food n the drift, even with warm water temperatures all summer. Resulting in, as I discovered yesterday, the fattest fall brookies I've ever seen. It seems that a lot of these fish have grown absurdly quickly this season. On a short evening trip, just 25 minutes, I covered 50 feet of water and caught four brookies. Three of them were in the top four largest fish I'd caught in this disconnected stretch of the stream. The biggest is only beat out of first by one male I caught in the fall of 2015, at the time an anomaly of a brookie that I'd never seen the likes of before there.

The amazing thing was how immediate it was. I got there, tied on a little hair wing streamer, and promptly caught the only male of the bunch.

This could just be a fluke.
Not a fair representation of the average.
A lucky, lucky evening.
Maybe it was. And I'd take that for sure: three of the best fish in the stream in a 25 minute trip? Sign me up!

But if that were true and it was a fluke, today would also have had to have been a fluke. A huge, enormous, massive, insane, wild fluke.