Sunday, October 01, 2006
Bigger bait needed to bring home a trophy trout
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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NATURAL WELL -- It's easy to lose focus on a trout stream during a mild day in early fall.
Stream-shading trees have begun their transformation into fall colors. The sounds of calling turkeys sometimes echo through the surrounding woods and fields. Deer tracks dent muddy banks, fueling visions of the upcoming deer season.
There's nothing like a ferocious brown trout charging your fly to snap you back to reality.
Dawn had just broken over Alleghany County on Thursday morning as I stood knee deep in a run of the Jackson River thinking, "Is this beautiful or what?" instead of concentrating on the task at hand.
Trout seem to know when you're not paying attention.
The big streamer had no sooner plopped down next to the bank when it disappeared in a violent swirl. The rod bucked for just a moment. Then the fish was gone.
It's hard to judge a fish by the swirl and the strike. It could have been an eager 12-incher. It could have been a 20-inch trophy.
Friend Dan Genest of Richmond and I had come here specifically to target the latter.
Unlike Tennessee tailwaters such as the South Holston, the Jackson River below Gathright Dam isn't exactly crawling with monster browns. But there are enough fish in the mid-teens -- and up -- to keep things interesting.
The best way to do this is to ignore the temptation to fish for the rivers' abundant little wild rainbows.
That's not easy.
When my streamer went untouched for an hour, I switched to a tiny dry to target the fish that were rising to a light but consistent mayfly hatch.
Dan, to his credit, kept plugging with his streamer, a 3-inch-monstrosity he picked up on a trip out West.
And, appropriately, he was rewarded.
"Oh, I just missed a good one," he said after jerking the bass-plug-sized fly through a deep slot next to the bank.
On his next cast he didn't miss.
The brown wasn't huge, maybe 16 inches long, its golden flanks dappled with red and black spots.
It had the big, gaping jaws of a male. As Dan unhooked the thing to release it, you could see that it could handle a fly twice as big as the one it had eaten.
Big trout of any species can become predatory, but browns take things to the next level. A friend once caught a 20-inch-plus brown trout that had the tail of a 10-inch-long sucker sticking out of its gullet.
That's not to say tiny nymphs or surface flies won't take trophy browns. You just have a better chance if you're showing them a mouthful, be it a bass lure or a big fly.
My current mini-obsession with browns got started just a couple of weeks ago. Finishing an out-of-town work assignment I made a stop at a small stream that holds both brook and brown trout.
Caught without my box of streamers, I tied on the biggest surface fly I had -- a cicada imitation -- and started casting.
Streamer strikes are exciting, but nothing beats seeing a brown the size of a muskrat rise from the depths to check out a surface fly.
On that trip it happened twice in three hours. Both times the fish turned away at the last moment after realizing the bug they were about to eat was made of foam and had a big hook in it.
A big terrestrial fly might have worked on the Jackson on Thursday. But after Dan caught another nice brown on his streamer, I knew how I would fish.
I bummed a big cone-head woolly bugger from Dan and got to work.
And it started to work.
At first, the only fish that seemed to care were ambitious rainbows. One sweet run produced two 10-inchers and a 12-incher.
With storm clouds appearing, we had to rush the final mile of the float. But one spot was too appealing to pass up. On the cast into the pocket I saw a golden torpedo rush out from the shoreline shade and spike the streamer.
My heart jumped.
So did the fish, and when it did I quickly saw that it wasn't going to be that 20-incher I've been chasing.
The colorful male may have been 14 inches. That's a dink on plenty of rivers.
Here, it was more than enough to keep an obsession going.
