Before the Stocking

Every year I like to get out on my closest TMA to see if I can find some holdover fish before the trucks come and deliver the new meat. Naive and and numerous hatchery trout are no longer fun for me with traditional methodologies. I practice certain methods on them, but if I'm actually going out looking to have fun catching them, I've grown toward using progressively more absurd flies. First it was big streamers. Then small gurglers. Now it's mice and giant pike and muskie flies. They just aren't hard to catch on nymphs, wets, or small streamers, doing the same old same old doesn't appeal to me anymore. But in my closest TMA, the winters are tough. Most of the trout that were stocked last spring and fall are gone, and the very, very few that remain have fallen into a natural rhythm. They are hard to catch and even harder to locate, and so allow me to actually continue to learn from using techniques I am already accustomed to. Unlike freshly stocked trout, these winter holdovers give me something to actually sink my teeth into, so to speak, precisely because they don't: I have to work hard for very little.

I would actually go so far as to say that, in some years, there are no winter holdover stocked trout in this river. It gets locked up in ice fast, shelf ice and anchor ice. Life is scarce. Baitfish go into heavy torpor, you won't see much of them. The aquatic macroinvertebrate, on the whole, go into hiding. This river doesn't get much of a winter caddis hatch. Stoneflies aren't that prevalent until things start to warm up. And as midge rivers go, this one isn't great. So there isn't much to eat to sustain large fish, especially ones that had been accustomed to regularly scheduled feedings. A lot of the fish go searching for more suitable, and if they find it it's often not within the trout stream. Occasionally, holdover trout get caught in unstocked reservoirs, big tidal rivers, even in salt water. Oftentimes the words "sea-run" are used to describe these fish when they end up in salt water, and that is a little bit inaccurate. There are usually strong genetic lineages to true sea run salmonid strains, and that is not at all the case for these hatchery born rogue trout. They don't run, really. And that's why CT struggled for years to produce a sea run trout fishery after being unable to obtain actual sea run strain stock. What we had was really a very small true wild sea run brown trout population, and rogue hatchery trout (browns and rainbows... I've caught stocked rainbows in brackish water) that sort of ended up in brackish or salt water in the winter because the water in which they were stocked in weren't providing what they wanted, and they'll never follow the migratory lifestyle that a true sea run trout would....

But I digress. The other day I went to seek out some of the few holdover trout that did't wander down into the Connecticut River. It took me a while. I nymphed. I fished wets with a mono rig. I dead drifted streamers. And eventually, after plying the water, observing carefully, I found a couple fish. The key was a little seasonal tributary, which was full of aquatic growth. The deep pool it emptied into was providing what a few holdover rainbows needed as far as cover, and the in-flowing spring was adding nutrients to provide the food. And I provided a Walt's Worm.

Soon, hundreds or freshly stocked trout will invade these waters, and I'll trade nymphs for mice and muskie flies, and have a riot of a time catching naive fish on massive surface flies. That'll be fun. Not challenging, but fun. 

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