Big Trout Frustrations

For three winters now I have been fishing the same small CT river looking for one of the handful of quite large wild brown trout that inhabit it. It has been an exercise in patience, exhaustion, and learning. I can say quite comfortably that I still barely know anything about this stream and it's strange, seemingly indestructible trout. There aren't a ton of them, especially not the really big ones. The water gets unacceptably warm every summer, yet the trout persist. Their are large amounts of pollution sources throughout the watershed. There is drug paraphernalia all over the damn place. Which will I catch first, my 28 inch brown or hepatitis? Nymphing. Doesn't. Work. At least not any conventional style of nymphing. I've never seen a substantial wild trout rise there. But one cold February day I encountered a pool full of rising juvenile trout... after sunset. Last December I hooked and lost a quite large trout... at night, with temperatures below freezing. I've never seen a mayfly hatch, but the nymphs are there.

This stream is so strange and so frustrating, and that's why I fish it as much as I do. I am FAR more likely to skunk out there than I am to catch even a 14 inch wild fish. Because of that, it holds my attention. I'm not looking for a sure thing anymore, I'm looking to catch the rarest fish in the river. And this stream's 22-28 inch brown trout, of which there must be less than 10 in 10 miles, fit the bill. They are a challenge worthy of my time, though it may well take me another 3 winters to get one of those fish.

I almost had one on Saturday. It was a near perfect day, with increasing cloudiness, pre-frontal conditions, above freezing, and a moderate flow. I even forgot to stick my memory card back in my camera and so only had my phone (I hate phone photography)... that is almost a guarantee that something spectacular is going to happen. I got so close. I had missed a few smaller fish spread throughout the just over two miles of river I had covered already when I came to a spot I had missed a 27-28 inch fish in last winter. In the very same spot, I came tight to a fish of the caliber I was hunting, a hen brown I'd estimate at 24 inches conservatively. It was a very heavy fish. It started out just head shaking, but coming up to the surface it started to alternate between death rolling and flailing violently. For 20 seconds it did this and I failed to gain control of it at all. The thrashing and rolling had exactly the effect the fish was going for: it wrenched that sharp thing out of its jaw and stopped that pulling force. That moment was gut wrenching. I felt like throwing up. My hands were shaking. I had been dealt yet another serious blow by this river, one of many. I kept fishing, hard and focused, but knowing full well I wouldn't get another chance. Not at a fish like that. And when I hooked a long, lean, acrobatic brown of 19 inches, it was all fine and dandy, but it didn't fill the hole I needed it too. I'm looking for one fish. One incredibly rare, smart, old fish. I almost had it, and this wasn't it. It ties place with another fish for the biggest I've caught in this river, but it was hard to feel like that fact carried much weight when the fish I had lost very literally carried a few pounds more.

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