Eastern Sierra road-trip – part 2

As you may remember, in part 1 of the story we left Jim Brown chasing a large brown trout that he had seen rising. After an hour of patient casting with no reward Jim had moved off downstream to pastures new...

I caught another brown of 15" and a pair in the 13-14 inch class. Smaller fish followed, only three of which were under 10 inches. After four hours on the water I'd landed ten fish, farmed a few and missed a couple of explosive strikes on the Hopper. Brandon, who'd not fished a river like this was beginning to get the hang of it and picked up a pair of fish. When I told him I'd seen a fish of close to 24 inches his reply was, "are you sure it was a trout?" - twice! Turns out that Brandon had earlier wasted an hour trying to get some of the river's big suckers to come up from the bottom for his dry fly thinking they were trout. It was now about 7 and we were pretty content as Wednesday had treated us a lot better than Tuesday. Despite the presence of some cold Pacifico’s enticing us back to the truck, we reasoned that we would give the river a few more casts before calling it a day. I decided to return to the area where I'd seen the big fish earlier and Brandon wanted to try a spot just downstream of me. I pounded the general area without so much as a refusal. I decided to try to enter the impossible lair one last time, but decided to try something other than the hopper I'd used to pound on the door earlier. Searching though my tackle boxes, I found one made up entirely of flies tied by Bart, large paraduns in tan and gray and a section that held four Parachute Adams. I picked out one that looked a little better than the others and added about five feet of 5x tippet, reasoning that if I could get really lucky with the cast that enough of the tippet would land in the eddy to give the fly a few seconds of presentation before the dreaded line and leader drag would take over. I tried and failed repeatedly, it just wasn't working. And then I got lucky as the fly and the added tippet collapsed into the eddy and I saw the fish for the second time as he made exactly the same kind of rise I'd seen him make earlier in the day. I yelled to Brandon who was half fishing and half watching and announced, "Its him!"

Brandon came running with his newly purchased net in one hand and his camera in the other. After a great fight that included several runs back across the river to his lair, I finally began to get the upper hand. Three times Brandon got his net under the big brown, only to see it fall out or flop off. The railbirds at Ken's were right. The net wasn't big enough! Fortunately, I was able to slide him through the shallows and onto the beach with the help of a final shove from Brandon. He was still long enough before I released him to get a good measurement - 22 inches, making him the biggest brown I've ever caught in a stream or river. Fortunately, Brandon got a few pictures of it (attached). Moments later, we heard cursing, yelling and screaming upstream from us. We rushed up to find out what the commotion was and found five guys in the water still yelling. All held rods, one had a camera and another held a large brown trout in a net which he held in a net. A guy I'd spoken to earlier on the river said that he was fishing when he saw an angler coming toward him and trying to follow the trout downstream. He estimated that the angler had followed the fish roughly 100 yards from where it was first hooked on a Stimulator. It looked to me like it might have been an inch or two larger than mine. Brandon got a shot of it (attached).

As we walked back to the truck, we could still hear the guy who caught the fish yelling as his partner showed him the fight and the fish he had caught on video. I'm pretty sure that I am going to want to spend a few days hanging around the East Walker the first week in June.

Further information

For more information on fishing the Eastern Sierra contact Ken’s Sporting Goods in Bridgeport, CA at www.kenssport.com.

For top-notch fishing and any other web design work you can contact Brandon at www.parkerwebsolutions.com