It messes with your head. It messes with expectations. It changes fishing from an interaction with the natural world, into a theme park contrivance, complete with burbling brooks, cascading cataracts, swaying spruce trees, and the sounds of seasonally appropriate birdsong. All so natural--except for the fish.
A stream loaded with stocked trout does not fish like a wild stream. There are far too many fish in the early stocked period. Somewhat later when the crowds diminish, it becomes more natural. And they are real fish--just not the same. Sometimes they act pretty much the same: they take flies, they rise, they chase streamers. But the only "hatch" they seem to know is power bait.
Fishing a stream for the naturally occurring wild fish is what one would think would be of greatest interest, but it is most assuredly not.
But I prefer to fish for wild fish.
This past Saturday, my son and I headed to a tributary that we have known for years. But never fished. Not once. It flows into a stocked stream that is popular. I fish it far more than any other water with the exception of the Sound. I've caught huge numbers of stocked trout there (and I've enjoyed that immensely!) But it is the wild fish that really satisfy me--because it is only then that I think I am learning what the river really is.
The tributary is also stocked with trout, in the lower reaches, but that's not why we went. We wanted to find what really lived there. After going as high as we could before private property, we set about fishing it in a high flow condition. After about an hour, we moved downstream a bit, noticing that there were not many slow sections. But there was this foam patch. I walked farther on and my son set to working it.
About 100 yards downstream I found a downed tree straddling the banks. Aha! A shadow line.
With one of my dead simple lite-brite flies, this one blue and black with a red head, and a bb shot, I fished it streamer-style on a #12--across and down. It only took 10 minutes. I felt the bounce off the bottom on every cast but then something different and sure enough that was my 5" fallfish. A beautiful wild fish doing what it does in 45 degree water in April.
Only minutes later I heard a commotion upstream. I put my rod down and sprinted up the path to get a look. My son had landed a healthy 9" fallfish. In his case it was that foam patch. He'd noticed quite quickly that fish were rising into the foam, taking something. He was dry fly fishing with one of my hackled lite brites. After 2 false takes he landed it.
Fallfish tend to be smaller than trout "on average" but so what? They are wild. They are native. They eat insects. They take dries. They take streamers (I caught my largest--12"--on a gray ghost). They have beautiful scales, and delicate coloring. They fight hard for their diminutive size!
The life in the stream would be poorer indeed without them. So what if I have to put in more effort to find them and catch them? That makes it far more interesting anyway.
As a bonus, we found a really cool insect on a tree. "Trout fare." No: Fall-fare haha.
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