[This is the final installment of a nice piece that Quinn fired over a few weeks ago as we started rounding up thoughts on the Wild vs. Native fish debate; read Part 1 here and Part 2 here. – Mark]
My first memorable experience catching pelletheads came when I was a struggling nymph fisherman on my home river in college. I think my problems with nymphs in those days could be traced to a lack of confidence. I never really believed that I would catch fish on nymphs once I gave in to the fact that I couldn’t catch them on dries (streamer fishing was not yet something I considered a viable means for catching trout—that particularly opinion has changed dramatically). As soon as I added a strike indicator, I was basically just going through the motions—until that day when I couldn’t help but catch fish on nymphs.
I’m not 100% sure that the hatchery truck had just planted the river near my fishing location—but it seems to be the only logical reason things changed so quickly for me. I was fishing some water near a campground, water that I had fished before and never done particularly well on. After I could only pound up a fish or two (or none, I can’t really remember) on dries, I switched to a simple nymph rig with an indicator and a dark brown bead-headed hare’s ear.
On the first or second cast the indicator went under. Based on past experience, I thought that it was certainly a rock. But instead I found myself hooked to a relatively bland but definitely fun rainbow trout. The pink stripe was barely a myth on this ten-incher. But I didn’t mind. I was happy to catch a fish on nymphs—something I really wanted to get better at.
Two hours later I had caught something like 20 of those drab-colored fish using the same fly. I was dumbfounded but happy. I sat on a bank rock and tried to work the whole thing out. What was different this time? Why had I caught fish using techniques that had failed me so often in the past? It dawned on me that all the fish were the same general size and that they were all rainbows, even though cutts and browns also lived in that section of the river.
At first, I was a little disappointed, realizing I must be fishing in a section of river where the hatchery truck had made a recent deposit. I felt like I had unwittingly cheated, that all those fish had somehow been tainted.
After a moment’s reflection, however, I felt differently. I had caught fish on nymphs—a lot of fish.
I had learned what a subsurface strike looks like and what good nymphing water looks like. By the time I caught fish number 20 I knew exactly which types of water would lead to that indicator being jerked under and which types would give me nothing. I became a better fisherman that day.
Most importantly, I had defeated the hex that seemed to exist whenever I strung up the strike indicator, and I had won some confidence in my fish-catching abilities—which was available only through the act of actually catching fish.
If it took some pelletheads to help me learn nymph fishing, who cares? Some people learn how to nymph by catching whitefish.
Of course hatchery trout can grow to be longer than ten inches. There is a reservoir in Eastern Idaho that is home to some large trout. As a fishing destination, it has a lot going for it. The water is spring-fed and the midge hatches literally blanket the surface at times. I have heard of fish moving into the shallows and feeding on the dead midges that crash against the shore when the wind blows (and in Eastern Idaho the wind never stops blowing). The lake’s primitive boat launch shares its’ parking area with a dive bar. But the spring water and all those midges (and especially the bar) are not the primary reasons that the fish are large.
No, that honor goes to the birds, or at least that is my understanding.
The birds around this particular lake are fish eaters—a host of pelicans and a few ospreys—who tend to eat smaller fish. When the Idaho Department of Fish and Game (remember them?) was planting fingerlings and 10-inchers, the birds ate fish—a lot of fish—which put a sizable dent in the lake’s trout population. So the IDFG made an unusual and some might say brilliant decision: they would plant nothing but 17-inch rainbows. Consequently, any fisherman who hooks up on this particular lake knows the fish is likely to be at least 17inches. And any fish that has been in the lake for at least a year will be near 20 inches or more. Sure these are planter rainbows, but they put a serious bend in the rod, and the twenty-inch mark still means a lot, enough to look past a fish’s upbringing for some of us.
My best day on the lake came a few years back, trolling leaches. My buddy and I hit a hot spot, a place where the fish seemed to congregate. Every time we trolled through we hooked up. It got to the point where we were taking turns working this spot in the lake that was no more than 30 square feet and wasn’t big enough for the both of us. The sky was a deep blue and the wind had decided to take a rare day off. He would cast, strip in slow until he came up tight on a trout and try to move it out of that magical box so that I could fish. I would make a cast into the area and sometimes hook up before he had even released his trout. There were several other fishermen bobbing around the lake on float tubes and pontoons, but no one was doing much except for us. At one point I landed a 22-two inch rainbow that barely fit in my net.
Was it the same as catching big wild browns or rainbows using dry flies on the Henry’s Fork? Was it the same as catching a big native bull trout on a five-inch long white streamer? Was it the same as casting to rising native cutts on the Yellowstone?
No, but it was still pretty darn fun.
And we owed it all to the hatchery truck driver and the folks at IDFG, to the birds who liked small fish, and to the happy-to-see-us pelletheads, without whom none of it would have been possible.
