Loading up a fly fishing trip with a lot of expectation seldom ends well for fly fishermen. Outside of the usual “I’m going fly fishing” excitement, no two trips are the same, and yet the memories of a prior slaughter burnish up nicely over the course of a year, so it’s possible they’re even brighter than the reality.
That’s a tough starting point for any trip.
Then there are the trout, who aren’t a party to your expectations. After all, they don’t care what you think – their goal is to leave you broken and disappointed at the water’s edge.
Steve Bertrand probably didn't have the same expectations I did, which was smart.
Big Brown Trout Syndrome
Last year, I fished McCloud Reservoir with Steve Bertrand, and yes, you could pretty much say we ripped it up, though the Undergrounders never actually read about it.
On that day, we caught a fair number of smallish rainbow trout, and then went headhunting. In the space of a spectacular two hours, I landed 21″, 19″ and 17″ brown trout – in addition to a pair of oversized rainbow trout.
That’s the kind of raw finny tonnage you dream about every time you string up your fly rod, and that it happened while I was stripping a streamer just as fast I could was only a bonus.
One of last year's McCloud Reservoir Brown Trout - in a great big boat net
In the clear water, you could see the big browns rocketing up to the streamer, though sometimes – in what amounted to a test of bladder control – they stopped just an inch behind the streamer.
In those situations you’re supposed to keep stripping just as fast as you can, and for fly fisherman who’s proven himself not quite capable of doing two things at once, it’s a tough job.
That you heard nothing of this Supersized Brown Trout Festival wasn’t game playing on my part; the trip fell just a few days before my father’s death, and for a time, confusion reigned.
Enter this year’s reprise of the trip, and for reasons that probably amount to little more than howling at the moon, I wanted a repeat of last year’s trip.
It seemed like the universe owed it to me.
The Early May Brown Trout Festival
Which brings us back to the expectation thing, which I’ve already suggested is unhealthy.
And in this case, I was right.
McCloud Reservoir was murkier than usual, and littered with debris. That’s not unusual for spring, but it doesn’t exactly scream “streamer” fishing.
Early on, we did well on the rainbows, half of which appeared to be recent stockers. The other half were pretty and full finned, and you never know if they’re holdover stocked fish or the wild McCloud variety.
A McCloud Rainbow Trout: Who'd overlook this in favor of something else?
Did I say we did “well?” Actually, we did lot better than that – to the point that we were calling the spot on the drifts where we’d get bit.
Still, even the hot rainbow bite hadn’t entirely erased the thought of big brown trout, and eventually we fired up the streamer rods.
And never caught another trout.
Frankly, I probably deserved it.
Expecting to catch big fish belies the gratitude you’re supposed to feel when nature hands you a raft of big trout, and as the Greek dramatists suggested, hubris is rarely rewarded.
There’s also the thought I’m something of an ungrateful shit for looking past the pretty rainbow trout, some of whom stretched into the 13″ range and sported those iridescent strawberry gill plates that hint at art instead of wildlife.
Still, while expectation probably leads directly to disappointment, hope remains the salve for any fishermen’s wound, and yes, I know there are big, big brown trout in a certain part of the reservoir, and it’s likely I’ll make another run at them, though hopefully with the right attitude in place.
See you on the river, Tom Chandler
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