Canal Flatties

Canal Flatties

Friday, July 6, 2012

My Biggest Trout part two (READ PART ONE FIRST!)

    Three weeks after my trip to the tye, I headed back with my little brother for the trophy brown I had seen, today I packed every bait a trout could ever want. I had worms, meal worms, minnows, spinners, tiny kast master spoons, trout magnets, power bait in various colors, salmon eggs, and a bunch of dries, nymphs, and streamers to use on my little brothers dogwood canyon 7' 4 weight (since I was a proud owner of a "three section two piece" 3 weight TFO). I began at the bridge hole where I had caught 3 browns and a rainbow on my previous trip. I ended up catching two good browns at around 10-12" long and put them on my stringer, my little brother released a few chubs and bluegill.
   We headed back to battery hill road, and the water was suprisingly less swift under the bridge today, but no trout were to be found. I noticed a well maintained trail today that looked like it was heading to the big browns home. I followed the trail and was sickened to find that the trail led straight to his home, I knew that he had been caught by now. But I decided to fish anyways, on my 4th cast with a trout magnet, I caught a very fat 15" brown, I was very pleased with this fish, for it was much larger than anyof the others I had caught here, and I put him on the stringer. My little brother landed a nice 10" brown on a meal worm drifted on the bottom and he strung that one up.  Something that I left out in part one is that this pool had a beach on one side, and a 30' cliff on the other, making it difficult to fish because of the distance between the beach and the deep water where the fish were holding. I worked my way around to the base of the cliff on the lower end of the pool and spotted a nice rainbow holding right up against the cliff. I cast my magnet in front of it, and could tell that I didn't need to twitch the bait at all, the fish hit it on the fall and I brought the healthy 16" rainbow to the net, and put her on the stringer, I could tell this was going to be a good day.
      I walked back to the beach and picked up the fly rod, and tied up a #14 adams dry fly, I fished that fly for 10-15 minutes with no takes, so I switched to a #14 bead head prince nymph. I fished this fly for another 10-15 minutes with no takes, and decided to go back to spin fishing. I hiked up into the woods and out on the top of the cliff and peered down, I was shocked to see at least 30 trout that would all go between 12 and 18 inches in length. I also saw Mr. Big sitting on the bottom on a ledge in about two feet of water, about 15 feet away from the school. He obvioulsly was king in this pool, and the other trout knew it. So I took the time to scale the cliff without spooking the fish, nearly falling into the pool 2 or 3 times, but I safely made it to the base of the cliff and found a small spot to stand. I cast the trout magnet probably 20 times watching every fish in the hole play the "lockjaw game" except for the big brown, he slowly eased into the deeper waters, out of sight, he had obviously not gotten this big by being dumb.
     I hooked a worm on my trout magnet jighead and cast out, hooking and losing about a 13" brown. I kept casting, and missed two more on the worm, and then they shut off. But then my heart beat sped up as I watched the big brown swim back on to the ledge, I cast my worm to him and he loomed back into the deep, at this point, I had no hope, but the time it took for him to spook off and come back began to shorten, and I noticed he was starting to watch the worm drift by (this process took about an hour but I really wanted this fish). I made a cast and it looked like it would be a pretty good drift, I watched as my worm drifted right to his nose, and all I was was a little sliver of white as he opened his mouth, and that was all it took, I immediately set the hook and drag started peeling off my shimano symetre 2500, I was using 4 pound line and an ultralight rod and was almost certain I'd lose him, after 3 or 4 runs and a bunch of short distance fighting trying to bring him to the net, I was able to keep his head up and my little brother did a great job netting him. I was so happy (and also relevied that I didn't lose him), there is no way to describe the feeling of sucess I had, shortly after I landed the fish, all of the locals came to swim, and were admiring the fish, and they knew he had been in there for a while (I also discovered he wasn't freshly stocked when I filetted him,the meat was orange like salmon). And that is the story of my biggest trout, thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it.
 Here is a picture of the brown, he weighed 5 pounds even and was 21" long.

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