Lots of fish that I've landed on a variety of waters provide great memories.

One from last year was very special. A cutthroat on a small mountain creek that refused the fly time after time while rising to naturals consistently for well over half an hour. A few days later, I went back to that spot and sat on the bank for over two hours waiting for the hatch to begin. When it did, the cutt appeared in exactly the same place, the same rise, the same take of a natural Western Green Drake. One well timed properly placed cast and I had him. 17" of beautiful cutthroat trout.

BUT that memory will likely fade and mingle with memories of the thousands of other fish that I've caught the past several years.

One memory will not fade - the one that got away.

I was on the Henry's Fork downstream of St. Anthony a year ago last September. I was fishing a Pine Squirrel Cheater off a class II full sinking line with a 5 wt rod, casting down and across and stripping it with short steady strips as it came across the current. Lots of nice brown trout ranging from 15" to 20" in hand that day.

In one particularly fishy looking spot, a hole just above the point where a side channel broke off from the main channel, the fly hit the water about thirty feet out from my position. Two strips and a boil where the fly should be. Just after he hit the fly, a huge brown rolled on the surface. Couldn't see him clearly from nose to tail, but from back to belly he was by far the biggest fish I've had on.

When he felt the hook, he ran once and paused. Then ran again. When he stopped the second time, I looked down at my reel. Two or three wraps of fly line over the backing.

Just downstream, there was a fast deep riffle. I knew that I could not follow him downstream - I'd tried wading some of that water a few days earlier and knew it would not be manageable for me. I knew that if I let this fish run any further downstream, it would take me a long time to land him, and being dragged a couple hundred feet or more upstream against that current back to my position would likely kill him.

I decided to hold him and hope for the best. A couple seconds later, the 2X 10# tippet broke cleanly. It was fresh tippet. Maybe he nicked it with a tooth. Or maybe the weight of the fish, which I estimated to be in the high 20" range, in that heavy current was enough to simply break it off.

John