Blue Line Surprise

Blue Line Surprise

By Michael Richardson

It was mid-March, but the temperature was twenty-six degrees. I was hiking up a trail with roughly twelve inches of snow. The only reprieve I had from the crunching and breaking through crust covered surface was when I hit the spaces that snowmobiles or ATV’s had travelled earlier in the week. I hiked way up into the mountains to see what gems I could find. I took my little hybrid tenkara/fly rod with me. I custom designed this rod only a few weeks prior and was hoping to get in some quality testing time, so you can imagine I was excited to put it to use on some native brook trout. Up until this point I had only landed 8 or 9 brook trout with it, so I was hoping to add a lot more to that number today.

The walk in was very tiresome and noisy. It was killing my zen that is wintertime brookie fishing. The air was crisp, but my efforts soon gave me a chill of sweat. I stopped to catch my breath and take in my surroundings. It is often too easy to miss these sights if you are in too much of a hurry to fish. So here we are, roughly a mile and a half from civilization with a decent walk ahead of us yet. I am at the base of a hollow with a nice stand of hemlocks and rows of mountain laurel underneath them. I can hear the stream in the distance and started seeing the tops of mountain laurel. My heart wanted to flutter, but I did not allow any diversion from my game plan. I knew that I wanted to see some of the finger streams that ran into the main branch of this stream.

Onward I press, with my “brookie stick” shoved into my waders. I was happy with this rod thus far and was determined to check these potential gold mines of brook trout. I looked at my map and had almost a half mile to go. Head held high, I paused to check out the spring seeps coming from themountain. Its rocks were covered in a pillow of moss. The snow had not settled here due to the ground water. A perfect place to take one last rest before traversing down the mountain to the stream.

One great thing about these mountain springs is that they offer a thermal refuge for brookies in the winter. I have picked up a lot of fish in the hole directly coming off one of these springs. I caught my breath, checked the map and kept on walking towards the tiny finger streams. Something about catching a brook trout in the smallest stream I can find always intrigues me. As I crested the top of the old logging road I was walking on, I could finally take my blinders off and focus on the stream. I looked down over the steep bank and it looked small from up here. I decided that I was going to toboggan down the hill on my backside and start fishing.

The water was super tight, and I was glad to have my “brookie stick” for this section. After nearly forty-five minutes and not getting a hit, I decided to walk the edge of the stream until I found some fish. I focused only on hitting smaller pools and such and skipped the mini-riffles. Maybe an undercut bank or log jam would hold a little gem for me.

A half hour passed before I found a nice plunge pool just downstream of a fruitless logjam. I walked down stream and away from this spot, so I did not disturb any of the fish in the pool. Most times I fish upstream, but on this trip, I was forced to bounce out and away from the stream and then come back to promising pools. I find this very effective, over just fishing down. “They will see you, and you will not catch them” is most often my philosophy when tempted to fish down.

I approached the pool sliding on my knees to keep my outline hidden. With the “brookie stick” you must push the envelope to make a cast. You take on a predator and prey mentality, and nearly become a heron. My mop fly landed just where I wanted it to and began to drift the plunge pool. I felt the tap, tap, tap, and rolled a very nice fish. I felt its weight and I would have loved to catch it. I drifted a few more times and finally connected.

The fish I caught may only have been two and a half to three inches long at best but was a true gem. Beautiful parr-marks graced the fish’s body. It had the silver shimmering backdrop as talked about in ancient Native American legends. Bright pink spots with very bleak blue halos were visible on this tiny small stream diamond. I took a quick picture and returned the fish to her pool. I was ecstatic because this fish was such a hard-earned fish.

I continued down the valley, leap frogging from pool to pool. I was excited to come across a large pool, on the back side of a fallen warrior of a hemlock tree. My "brookie stick" was severely handicapped on this hole as I could not cast very far, so I had to do the unthinkable and fish this hole the wrong way, DOWN. Remember my quote, this is a forbidden policy of mine while brook trout fishing. I went above and hid in a rhododendron bush that was half crushed from where the old hemlock had fallen. I flipped the rod out and gave my simple streamer a few twitches. I felt the unmistakable tap, tap of a fish taking my streamer. I set the hook and looked down expecting to have a three- or four-inch native brook trout dangling on the end of my streamer. Suddenly a huge white mouth opened, and a monstrous hold-over rainbow was on the end of my line.

"What the heck is this?!” I shouted wildly.

I hastily jumped on top of the brush pile while keeping my arm as high in the air as I could. There was twelve inches of snow on the ground and my bare hand became quite cold as it buried into the snow as I hurdled over the old warrior hemlock. I am looking into the pool and see what can only be called a small stream monster on my line. I am still 100% green on landing a fish on a tenkara style rod, and without a reel or drag I knew I was in for an epic battle. My instincts pretty much kicked in, and I kept the rod held high and constant upward pressure on the rainbow. She was not happy and filled the pool with head shakes and short runs. I was scared to death that the fish would take the whole top section of my hybrid tenkara rod. I had not designed this rod for fish of this caliber.

I was not going to risk disturbing any brook trout redds, so I carefully walked into the silty area of the hole, away from any gravel that may still have eggs or fry in them. The bend in my one-weight “brookie stick” was incredible. I was about hip deep in the water and silt when the fish was finally tiring out. Due to a previous fight I had with a rhododendron bush that my net did not survive, I was left to only one option, reaching my hand down into in the icy water to land this fish. I reached in to the water up to my shoulder and landed this fish. I cradled her in the water as I walked her carefully towards the bank. I just sat there, soaked to the bone, in twentysix-degree weather, just gasping in disbelief.

I looked down at her body and it easily was longer than my elbow to finger tips. To give you a point of reference, I am 6 foot, one inches tall. She was beautiful, and the type of fish you would want to get mounted if you were into that sort of thing. She had a red stripe nearly an inch wide that ran from her tail all the way up to her eye. Deep reddish pink and near spawning colors. I grabbed my phone and took a few quick photos and a video of the release. I knew no one would ever believe this epic battle without evidence.

After the initial adrenaline wore off, I started to feel bad for this fish. Through no actions of her own she was put here. She is an invasive species in a stream where she just didn’t belong. She is only being a fish, but how many of the brookies like the one I caught early had she consumed just to survive? The stream's ecology is not set up to handle a fish like this. I am still kicking around the idea of harvesting that fish once the season opens to help protect my beloved brook trout, but that will have to wait for another day. For on this day, she was set free, never to be seen or caught again.