OK, walking the shore of a very clear lake that is stocked several times a year with Rainbows…once a year old brood stock are added and some are very large.
I see two Carp rooting along the edge then a third rooting between the others…or so I thought.
The one in the center pops up and suspends just below the surface and low and behold it is a HUGE Rainbow…24" at least…jaw looks a little hooked and it’s fat.
WEll, I was actually circling the lake from a river access point and had a Gurgle Pop for Smallies tied on and figured what the heck and actually cast it right in front of it’s nose, about 14-16" off…it just sidled up to the fly and continued to suspend there for a couple more casts then started to cruise along…suspending every 10-20 feet or so.
Should I have been able to catch this fish? Or is this perhaps a resting type stance?
What would you do?
I don’t fish for trout often and have confronted this scenerio a couple times at this lake.
I’d try and take a picture of a magnificent fish.
Every once in a while you will get to see something you can’t have. But it is meant to keep you trying.
I saw a carp one time while fishing that had to be about 4’ long. It looked like a torpedo slowly cruising by. So huge was it that I backed away up the bank, I had never seen anything that big in fresh water.
But it wasn’t meant to be caught, it was meant to be revered and remembered.
Left alone, these dennison’s of the deep can grow huge. There are cat fish down at the face of Hoover Dam on the Colorado River that could swallow a man. Divers doing face inspections of the dam have come back and refused to go back down for fear of the huge cat fish they saw down there. Here is one example.
Some things are meant to be seen and not touched.
Hello brhoff, next time you encounter such behaviour from a trout that large, tye on a black marabou leech pattern that you tied on a #4 streamer hook. Use reddish orange thread for a substantial head and try to get a slight rounded shape. Use the reddish orange thread to tye in the first course of marabou then switch to black thread for the remaining several courses until you’ve created a leech pattern of around 4 or 5 or even 6 inches long once wet.
There isn’t much swimming in the piscatoral realm that can resist this pattern as long as they can take it in. I’ve had large browns, rainbows and steelhead slashing viciously at this pattern for years now. Lmb and smb also, not to mention very large crappie and gill. Simple to tye, fun to fish with. You’ll be laughing and so will your friends when you take one out of the box…it looks like a dead blackbird when dry (hint, lots of marabou) and won’t sink for a while unless you spit on it copiously. Ok, that ought to do it for you brhoff, good luck.
Normand…if’n there were a fish fetchin’ curr around, they would have grabbed this one…
This park is notorious for dog walking and one of the reasons I avoid it in general…one of those places where folks treat there dogs better than the people around them, ignore leash laws and get irate if you say anything regarding their little pooch including asking them to refrain it from jumping all over you…
You will.
Because you are a Fisherman. You love it!
If we can give more than we take, like emptying a box of worms or crickets into the water before we leave to thank the fishes, even though we were fly fishing, the fisheries can be sustained.
Give back. And respect the fishes we all love. Even the one’s we aren’t meant to catch…
My Daddy told me, “There are bigger fish in the sea than’s ever been caught.”
Another thing he was right about…
Hi brhof, personaly in the summer I would have a tried a damsel nymph twitched in front of him and if that failed and he did not spook from the damsel the next cast would be 10 metres ahead of him with a suspender buzzer, do not twitch or retrieve, if he sees it and does not take it you can get another shot, If you are not shaking too much to cast straight!
All the best.
Mike.
Given the lake I’m guessing you were fishing, there doesn’t seem to much aquatic life in the form of insects. Caddis flies is about all I’ve seen there. Had that been me, I would’ve tied on a good sized hopper with a caddis nymph. It sounds like he was probably eating what the carp rooted out of the silt and mud, which was likely caddis larvae. But, he also came to inspect your gurgler, which means he was looking up too.
I’d toss one of my foam boddy hoppers with a BH chammy caddis…
But then again, I like the leech idea too.
You never know, maybe that hold over would still take “fish food” too (i.e dog-food fly).
On most lakes that I fish midge patterns work extremely well. In the early morning and evening you should see midges buzzing the surface. Trout cruise just below the surface looking for the swarm then pop up for a quick snack.
