I’ve gone trout fishing several times this summer, I just haven’t told you about those outings. It’s probably a good thing because those outings were pretty uneventful. At times it felt like I didn’t know what I was doing or that I knew what I was doing but I was just in the wrong spot. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case during my most recent trip to the trout stream.   

I made my first cast standing in waist high weeds on the shoreline, trying to stay hidden from the trout. My starting lure was a yellow spotted rooster tail. It’s not an old favorite or an heirloom passed down from Grandpa Wally, but rather the first one that caught my eye when I opened up my small trout box. My lure hit the water and I started my retrieval that was interrupted a nano second later by an unmistakable tap on the business end of my line. Instinctively I heaved back on the rod and a moment later I was holding a respectable brown trout in my hand. Wow, it was just the first cast! This was going to be a great morning.

The second, third, fourth and fifth cast ended exactly like the first one: me admiring a great looking trout. A lot of fish look so similar that they could be clones of each other but not trout. They look like they were painted one at a time and with such precision to make each one individually unique. I eased each fish back into the stream without even taking time to snap a photo, but I should have. Hands down, trout are eye candy of the fishing world. I’m not really sure how many fish I caught that morning, but it was easily more than all my previous outings this summer, combined!  

There is a moment and a fish that stand out that made the morning special. I was about to move further upstream and before the fish hit my lure I could see the V heading towards destiny. An instant later the big trout zeroed in on my rooster tail and the fight was on. The fish first took a path towards the rocks along the shore and when I tugged it clear of that it shot across the stream, towards a big tree stump snag which is where the fish probably called home. I wished out loud that I would have brought along the old Grandpa Walleye dipnet because hand landing this fish was going to be a bit of a challenge. Fast forward and a few seconds and the fish was resting on my hand. It was a 20-inch brown trout, heavy on the brown and not so spotted like its younger relatives that I had previously caught.

My outing ended a few casts later because I figured it wasn’t going to get any better after the beauty I had just caught. I packed things up and drove home feeling pretty good about myself and about my trout fishing abilities. The very next morning I woke up early and drove right back to that spot but when I arrived, I was surprised and disappointed to find a truck parked there. Dang it. I was bummed, but I also thought that it would be kind of neat for someone else to walk away from that spot feeling as good as I had the day before. Good luck to the white Ford pickup truck.  

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