Which do you remember longer?

This experience?
Landing a HUGE trout
http://flyanglersonline.com/features/readerscast/rc492.php

Or this morning

First cast of the day 6:40am
0X new leader
The trout hits the size 6 coneheaded turkey leech almost immediately.

ALL I see is its TAIL
OMG
Bigger than my hand and I have a HUGE hand.
It takes off running immediately. Joe puts a little pressure on it trying to turn it.

The line comes back limp. The escapee bit through the new 0x leader.

Joe put on that brand new 0X leader in front of me. Was not angler error or tactical error.

The trout won on this day.

Joe’s walked back to the car and was muttering and with absolute disbelief.

Joe got a glimpse of the whole fish. He said it was bigger than one the in the above story.

I say the “One That Got Away” will be remembered longer.

Joe just called me and we are planning our next visit to 0X.

To be honest, if you wrote it or had anything to do with it
I remember very well…

Good stuff! :smiley:

Steve

I agree. " The one that got away" would definitely be remembered longer. Better to have battled and lost than to not have battled at all. Great story. Thanks.

Beaver

Both would be prominent in my memory. However, for now, my best memory is landing one fish after another on the St. Joe in North Idaho. I only fished for 45 minutes, but I must have landed a dozen fish. (The older the memory, the better the story gets.)

St. Joe experiences dominate my fishing memories. Magic place. And a 10" fish was large when I fished there in the 60s. Thank everyone for the improvements that catch-and-release provide to a fishery.

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

Personally, I’ll settle for either memory…:smiley:

I’m really enjoying the quality of the stories you guys pass on. I can almost feel the action and the excitement like it was my own. Thanks for telling the stories.

I see the nice things about C&R, you probably will not like my column this week. Sorry.

I actually loved your message. I love to eat fish and have no problems killing and eating them. I do NOT kill them all, but I will eat some from every legal stream.

I have to say, I also have no problems with the looks I get from other FFers when I kill a legal fish. There is a famous stream in Norther California which gets heavy pressure, and has a limit of 2 fish over 18". I usually kill one when I fish there, and have felt at times that I would be thrashed by the fly rods of those next to me. THAT IS WHY THERE IS A LIMIT THERE, PEOPLE!!

What I enjoy about fishing there the most is when those fishers are using their foam/yarn/etc strike indicators, and I float my little red and white bobber down the same stream. A bobber is a bobber, and I like the way they float, and cast. I also find the red/white keeps my roots out there where I can see them.

So Right on, Castwell. Fish is good for you, has plenty of Omega oil, and tastes really fine.

When Joe called this morning I told him that he saved money not landing that fish.
I would have taken scads of photos and would have had to make a fiberglass repro
made. So the big fish saved him 400 bucks by not being landed.

Len

Did you ever think that the real reason C&R is so popular, is because it’s easier to lie about your catch?

Hello bdharris, welcome to FAOL, the best
fly fishing site of it’s kind. You’re going to
like it here. Do you venture north very far
for your trout fishing if I may ask?

Cheers,

MontanaMoose

troutgeek, well, no, but you are right in that it does make it easier to inflate the count for those guys who are into that stuff. I used to fish with a guy who would always report that, “I really got hammered out there”. (fishing for salmon from a beach). I guess he meant he had lots of bites or hits or takes or something. It seemed to make him happy. :slight_smile:

Personally, I find the comments about C & R making it easier to lie about your catch and / or inflate the count offensive.

There’s another take on C & R which probably will ring much truer to most fly anglers, and certainly to the people who regularly contribute to the FAOL BB.

If C & R WERE NOT ALLOWED and you had to keep everything that you caught, and possession limits, which often include the fish that you have at home in the freezer, were strictly enforced, most folks could fish only rarely, unless they wanted to eat and / or give away a lot of fish to reduce the number of fish in possession, and quite likely only for a short time on any given outing.

Without C & R, there would be a lot fewer folks fly fishing. What would be the point of investing in all the gear used in fly fishing to go out for a short time once in a while to fill up your possession limit and then leave a great spot in the middle of a great hatch or a great run because you caught a few fishies ??

Without C & R, FAOL probably wouldn’t exist. And if it did, the Bulletin Board would probably be a place where political discussions on how to allow C & R everywhere were the mainstay of the FAOL and Sound Off forums.

Sure, there will always be some folks who lie about their catch or inflate the count, but I don’t think C & R is any factor at all in when and where and how and why that takes place. The same folks lie about their incomes, their golf scores, running times for a 5K, amount of weight benchpressed, etc. etc. etc.

John

Although I live in San Diego, I fish mostly from my mother’s summer home on Lake Couer d’Alene. St. Joe, Couer d’Alened, and Clark Fork rivers. Maybe the Clearwater this year.

bdharris,

San Diego was my old stomping grouns as a teen. Graduated from Hoover High school a long time ago. Went back to San Diego about ten years ago. Drove into the city from Santee and had trouble seeing because of the brown haze that was hanging in the air. Couldn’t find my way around anywhere, was lost constantly.

Fish to remember.

When I lived in the Scottish Borders there was a small reservoir that was stocked and run by Selkirk Angling Association who would stock it with fingerling browns and takeable rainbows. Fishing on this was limited to two boats with two rods in each so there was not much pressure on the water.

I was drifting a boat towards what used to be an island but the rear of it had silted up, I had cast a couple of times on the approach and had had no luck, I cast again quite close to the bank and my fly landed on a leaf of a bush overhanging the bank. A small tug caused it to fall from the leaf onto the water which imediately exploded as a fish took it and ran to the deeps. Line was stripping off at a remarkable rate and I had to turn the boat to get control of the fish. For 15 minutes my line went alternately tight and slack as this fish tried everything to throw the hook. Eventually I got it to the surface to find I had made contact with the biggest brown trout I had ever caught, 4 1/4lb. A worthy adversary and a remarkable capture!

I will remember that one for a long time!

Sounds good bdharris, now in case you didn’t
notice, there’s a ‘fish-in’ on the Lochsa each
year in September. You can find info on same
out on the home page, left hand column.

Cheers,

MontanaMoose

For me, it’s definitely the fish that got away. All the fish I’ve caught over the years have become one big blob in my memory. However I do have vivid memory of several fish that I never touched.

My earliest was probably 50 years ago, I was a little kid talking to an older gentleman who was sitting on the bank fishing with a cane pole. The bobber went down, I think he just didn’t want to leave his chair, and he tells me to go pull it up. I did, and there was what seemed to me then a monster pike that promptly broke off.

The other really vivid memory happened about 10 years ago, I was dry fly fishing an evening hatch in late mate, catching numerous 10 - 12 inch trout. Suddenly this humongous drop back steelhead does a porpoising rise. What was odd, he was so close, it was like we were looking at each other, eye to eye. I never even set the hook, I can still picture the look in that fish’s eye.

Glad you asked.

Back in a different life and time, when I was new to flyfishing, I was invited to participate in the annual West Yellowstone businessmen’s outing. I worked at the only bank in town (at that time) and got to tag along.
I was assigned to Bob Jacklin’s boat and we floated the Madison in the morning, ate lunch and then put in at the Box Canyon of the Henry’s Fork. We were at the tail-end of the Salmonfly hatch and the fish were still looking up.
Bob put me in a riffle and told me to “work the water”, my being fairly new to flyfishing meant that I beat a froth on the water in working it, but it was great fun. I watched Bob as he fished streamers and shot casts farther than I ever thought possible.
As I stood in mid-river, having caught several small fish on big Sofa Pillow stonefly patters I started casting to the shore, about right where I had entered the water 20 minutes earlier. I dropped the fly about 12" off of the bank and immediately a huge nose broke the surface and me, being extremely excited, pulled the fly right out of his mouth.
I was shaking by then, but I took a deep breath, dropped the cast in about the same place and the same nose broke the surface and inhaled the fly. I set the hook and the fight was on.
I fought the fish both near and far, but soon the fish turned and went downstream. I planted my feet and fought him for about fifteen minutes (or at least it seemed like that long), when finally my line went slack and I reeled in to find my fly still attached.
I learned a lot of lessons that day, but the one I still remember the most is to follow big fish downriver in that big current like the Henry’s Fork. The second I remember most is how it felt to fool a very big fish. I never did see the fish, except for his snout as he took my fly, but I’ll always remember the strong pull and throb at the end of my line. I was hooked, apparently better than that fish, and have pursued this crazy sport with a passion ever since.
I’ll never forget that experience, and it seems as fresh today as it was 25 years ago.