Tales and Trails

Baiting the brookies

Fall has always been my favorite time of year which shouldn’t come as a surprise because of the hunting seasons. Fall comes at a cost, which is that winter follows. I will always vote for a longer fall and a shorter winter but the older I get the more I appreciate spring which I feel is a celebration of making it through the snow and cold season.

Another reason I look forward to spring is that summer follows and I can enjoy trout fishing. Now I'm not a diehard trout guy by  any means, but I do manage to get out a few times to catch enough fish for an occasional  meal. Going trout fishing was like an itch that  I needed to scratch and that’s how I ended up on the trout stream.

I know a spot that sees little pressure and holds 15-inch brook trout. The problem is that the stream is gin clear and in some spots it’s so narrow that you could spit across it. The trout are so leery that if you see them, chanc- es are they have already seen you. No matter  how many times you cast at them, they just will not bite. The trick is to crawl in close and cast over the tops of the weeds guarding the edge of the stream and then hope and pray.

That was my strategy until I overshot my casting spot and pulled the weeds aside to see 20 brook trout staring at me. Optimistically I started casting anyway and managed to fool zero of them. If I was going to have fish for  lunch, it wasn’t going to be from this hole. It was at that point that I suddenly became even hungrier for baked trout and my outing ov cially became a quest.

I moved away from the stream in order to approach the next hole without giving away my presence. Luckily the shade and the underbrush provided the perfect curtain to slip in behind and I eased into position. No one was the wiser. The brookies were laying there facing upstream, unaware of me or that one of them was going to have lunch with me, well, sort of.

My cast landed in the middle of the stream and far enough away that the trout were not alarmed. As my lure neared the pack, several darted out ahead to meet it. One of the bigger ones broke away and gobbled up my lure. A milli-second later I felt the tug on my line and a fight broke out. Usually, I'm pretty  casual about this stage of a trout battle but when lunch is at stake, that’s a game chang- er. I eased the fish to the side of stream, slid it  onto shore, and grabbed it immediately.

My quest was finally over and I had my  baked trout but here’s the deal: my trout wasn’t big enough. I’m not sure if this is good or bad news but after eating the entire fish, I'm still hungry for trout! 

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