Well, it worked. It was the perfect morning to look for a mouse bite: foggy, cloudy, and eventually rainy. The flow was perfect. We got there early. Withing minutes of arriving at the river, I'd had one big fish swipe at the mouse and miss and then another slightly smaller one pinned just briefly. Then one slob came up and just slurped it and I was into my largest wild brook trout yet. With 1x and my 5wt, the fight wasn't much to write home about, though I'd certainly only hooked a handful of brook trout that had given such a battle. My personal best wild brook trout, in Maine, on a master splinter, in daylight... this was totally bad ass. But it wasn't over... oh no, it was just beginning.
I missed a number more takes from slob brookies on the mouse just out of pure shock that it was working as well as it was. Of course, as I got over it, it kind of stopped working as well. I waffled for a while, trying to nail down a pattern, but I was only catching small fish again. But then I changed to a streamer, a dace imitation of my own devising that I call "Ace of Dace", and that worked. In a pocket just above where I'd lost my monster the day before a good sized brookie jumped on the take, clearing two feet easy. It refused to come back though, so I rested that fish and came back later. In the intervening time, I found some small fish and some quartz crystals.
When I came back, the fish had moved up the pocket, but it was still there and it was still hungry. It wasn't a slob like the first fish, but it was big, fat, and very pretty. It had about the most extraordinary gill plate marbling I'd ever seen on a brook trout.
I felt I had found the pattern now. Twitching the Ace of Dace through deep buckets, just under the surface, seemed to be the way.
I found a place where I was semi-comfortably able to get across the river, which was fun and definitely very dangerous, then started working back up that shore. I worked the buckets and caught and moved some good fish, and eventually I did find another big one. In fact, it was even larger than my first fish. I broke my personal best a second time, with an even better looking large male.
After watching that absolute stud disappear back into the depths, I continued upstream, now starting to semi-regularly miss large brook trout, but replacing them with fair sized landlocked salmon. I was good with that. Little else fights like a landlocked salmon. They tend to spend more time in the air than in the water after the hook is set.
After bumping up through some serious pocket water, catching five or six landlocked salmon in the loiw to mid teens, one brookie of about 15, and missing some larger brook trout, I came to one of the only big pools around. There were some risers in there but I decided instead to cast my dace imitation up a seem and two hand retrieve it back down. Just moments into the retrieve there was a big explosion and I came tight to 24 inches of very angry, very muscular landlocked salmon. The fish began launching itself over and over, cartwheeling down the pool, headed downstream. It made it just to the tail out and I managed to stop it. I was relieved for that, if it had kept going there was no chance I was catching it. This pool basically dumped right into a set of waterfalls. When the fish turned upstream, it didn't stop jumping, which I was OK with because it was expending energy doing that instead of running and I could land it faster and hopefully handle it easier. That ended up not quite being true. After five minutes and 22 total jumps I had my biggest landlocked salmon at my feet, literally tearing itself up in rage. I saw a couple small plumes of blood exit puff out of it's mouth and knew I had to act quick. I grabbed the fly my the nose and pushed it out quickly, turned the fish around, and let it swim off. I didn't even consider trying to photograph that fish. Any time out of the water and that fish would very likely have expired. She was stunningly thick and very chrome, the best looking salmon I'd ever seen in person, and true beast western Maine landlocked, but I value a fish's life more than a photo.
That fish had put down the rest of the pool, so I decided to head downstream to try to get some of the fish I'd missed on the way up. I didn't, but standing on a boulder above a big back eddy, I watched an absolutely huge brook trout come up five feet from the bottom three times to take large golden stones off the surface. I tied on a mouse and drifted it over him and he had no interest in it at all. I dug through my boxes, looking for something that might tempt this fish, and I wasn't seeing anything that really struck me as being right. Then I happened to glance, out of the corner of my eye, the perfect fly. It wasn't my own, someone had evidently dropped it there. It was a classic salmonfly dry fly. I tied it on, made one cast, and watched the biggest brook trout head I'd ever seen engulf it. I set the hook and the battle was on. This brookie basically sounded (not the noise kind of sound) like a false albacore or tuna, diving to the bottom, turning broadside, swimming in circles, and just flat out refusing to come up. Eventually I did leverage it up from the bottom. I slid down the rock and put my hand under this beast's head. It wasn't as colorful as some of the fish had been, though it had serious shoulders and a huge kype. I put it up against my rod to get an idea of how long it was. When I later measured, it was between 21 and 22 inches in length. I held it there for a moment, just shaking my head and smiling. I reached for my pack and camera momentarily then hesitated.
My biggest wild brown and my biggest wild rainbow had both been at hand almost long enough for me to get shots of them before deciding they just weren't into it. And to an extent I'm actually proud of that. Those fish were for me... I and only I remember exactly how they were caught, how big they were, and what they looked like. It somehow felt wrong to now turn a lens towards the largest wild brook trout I'd ever seen in person. So I didn't. The images of the two largest fish I'd caught on unquestionably the best morning of brook trout fishing I'd ever experienced both exist only in my memory and in watercolor, and I am more than satisfied with that. They left their mark in more ways than one.
What I do regret is not promptly taking that lucky stonefly off and securing it somewhere. I do have the parachute sulphur I caught my biggest brown on and the black leach I got my giant rainbow on, but the salmonfly I caught my largest wild brook trout on is presently in a tree in Western Maine.
I headed upstream to see if the landlocked salmon had turned back on in the pool I caught the big one in. They had, and they were still very hip to a two hand retrieve, tough I did eventually have to change to a weighted fly to tempt the last few. I did get a pretty good one, though nothing of the
caliber of the first that pool had given up.
And that was that, really. I probably could have stayed there another two or three hours and just stayed on fish the whole time, but I was satisfied. I had come to get big brook trout and I did. I was ready to say "goodbye until next time" to the Rangeley Region.
This is what Noah and I do. We roll into town for a few days, say "We've come for your fish", and with surprising frequency, manage to do as well or better than we'd planned. I take pride in having a big enough base of knowledge of how rivers, lakes, and ocean shores are structured and how fish behave to go pretty much anywhere and have some amount of success. Put the best trout angler in the world on a stretch of southern New England shoreline and tell them to catch a false albacore, they probably won't get the job done. It is my opinion that the best anglers also have the broadest range of species, water types, and tactics in their skill set. If I can, I would like to be the best fly angler I possibly can be. To achieve this, I have a lot of time and work to put in, and I have to regularly try to do things I've never done before. And the day after we left Rangeley, Noah and I were going to do something neither of us had ever done, and it was going to be really really cool.
Until next time.
Fish for the love of fish.
Fish for the love of places fish live.
Fish for you.
If you enjoy what I'm doing here, please share and comment. It is increasingly difficult to maintain this blog under dwindling readership. What best keeps me going so is knowing that I am engaging people and getting them interested in different aspects of fly fishing, the natural world, and art. Follow, like on Facebook, share wherever, comment wherever. Also, consider supporting me on Patreon (link at the top of the bar to the right of your screen, on web version). Every little bit is appreciated! Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, john, and Christopher, for supporting this blog.
