Revisited

My perfect trout is not a rainbow after all, and he isn’t as big as I thought he might be, given his choice of feeding lies. I went back for a visit this afternoon and, well, solved the puzzle. There is no question this nice wild brownie proved a worthy adversary.

I wasn’t seeing any rises upon my arrival, so I began the slow walk downriver to see what I might find. That trout remained supremely confident, for I’ll be damned if he didn’t begin to rise as I approached.

I had stayed with my usual 5X fluorocarbon tippet during our previous encounters but try as I might I could not get a perfect float through that wrinkly maze of currents and upwellings this fish called home. I had considered going down to 6X but, believing he was probably an outsized rainbow, I didn’t want to risk it. Our Delaware River rainbows have broken plenty of 5X tippets over the years with their long, fast runs topped off with aerial acrobatics.

This afternoon I knotted a long 6X tippet to my leader followed by an olive T.P. Dun in size 20. The drift certainly looked better, but it seemed that my friend wasn’t eating olives. Some rises were gentle splashes, and a couple of others were soft. I considered the season and changed my fly to a size 20 winged black ant.

My second drift resulted in a brief shiver at the surface and loss of sight of my tiny ant, so I eased the rod tip up and I had him at last. He thought he was a rainbow I guess, clearing the water half a dozen times as we danced. When I got him close, there was no question that he was a brown.

A seventeen-inch wild brown trout is a nice fish anywhere. In some places, I have heard anglers talking about big fish that measured a few inches shy of that mark. I have no complaints that this hard-won game didn’t result in a twenty-inch or better trout to note in my log. I earned the chance to put a nice arch in my fly rod and take the snapshot at the top of this page.

During my early years chasing difficult trout, there were a number of times my hard-earned trophies turned out to be trout less than a foot long. I let out a laugh when I landed every one of them, for they demanded my best and gave me theirs. I cannot ask more of any fish that swims.