The next trip was a solo outing to STSNBN en route to the cabin for a night. Conditions were just about perfect. The chub were just coming off their spawning colours, with some of the males’ tubercles starting to fall off. They weren’t as swarming and voracious as they get later, but I steadily caught chub and some shiner. I saw the odd trout, including a small one in the starting pool, but generally was striking out.
When I got into the trouty lower stretch it became a bit of a spooking excursion. I saw a couple of larger fish, but didn’t threaten to catch anything. The most interesting thing was in slow pool, where I caught four small smallmouths. I’d only ever caught a single smallmouth before (from the same pool) at STSNBN, and these were there first centrarchids of 2016.
I got down to “trout pool” and slapped in my sparkle bugger. A largish brown chased it, and behind it came thundering a massive brown. The strike missed and they both disappeared. Frustration was starting to build, now. The bottom pool yielded nothing but chub, but I tried to just savour the late evening and I spent a good while there. I started back as dusk was coming on. Which experience has shown is by far the best time for the browns.
I got back to trout pool. For whatever reason I switched to an egg pattern with a pigsticker hung off it. I tossed the pigsticker into the likely water (a deep run, complicated this year by a drowned log and branches) and the largish brown hit it. Behind it, again, came the massive brown, racing again to try to steal the prize. There was a vigorous fight, but I got the largish one in and netted. I measured it at a shade over 13″.
So. That should have taken a pleasant day and made it a pretty damned good day. But there was this business of the massive one, which dwarfed the largish one. I figured all the commotion, and me having to come down the bank and into the water to net the largish one, should have ended matters. But I went back up the bank and got settled. In went the pigsticker to exactly the same place.
And the massive one rose like a submarine and hit it.
I’ve played what happened next over and over in my head for the past weeks. It still stings about as much as it did live. The thing was solidly hooked. The largest trout I’ve ever had on a line, including some pretty big ones from my early 20s in the Canadian wilds. It ran all over the place. I was using the GM Suikei 39 and it was doing its job. But. But but but. I had gravitated toward 6X fluorocarbon tippet. And that’s what I had on. I didn’t expect a potentially 20 inch brown. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Yet the GM 39 protected it. The thing lumbered around, and when it didn’t feel like moving, I couldn’t move it. It breached and came down on its side like a cow tipping over into the pool. All sorts of thoughts about landing it went through my head, always followed by panicked reality checks that the damn thing wasn’t landed yet and it wasn’t real obvious how it was going to get landed. In retrospect, I know what my only chance would have been. I had the GM 39 in the shortest position, at 330. If I’d opened it up to 390, I’d have had the distance to bring the fish to my (short handled) folding net. That’s the only way I could have gotten it. Had there been a second person who could have netted it, the fish was caught. It was firmly hooked, and stayed on the line for several minutes.
As it was, I tried to handline it. I got the line in my hands. The fish thrashed in the shallows across the front of me. I got another couple of feet pulled in and another hand on the line. The fish got turned directly away from me, gave a huge thrust, and the 6X fluoro tippet, held in my hand with no give, snapped.
I sat there for like five minutes. It was a fish that dwarfed a 13″ brown. It could have been over 20 inches. So I just sat there looking at the pool. Maybe not the fish of a lifetime. But probably one of them.
So oh well. Eventually I collapsed the rod, picked myself up, and walked back to the Jeep in the dark.
Still not over it.