High water brown trout
This morning I met up with Todd and Aaron from Trail Creek Guide Service out of Indiana in hopes of getting them into a few Wisconsin browns. This trip was a trade from this summer when I went down by them for Skamina Steelhead fishing. Except for when I woke up my biggest fears came true. NOAA was calling for up to a half inch of rain over night and at the rate my rivers were dropping I was really hoping for no rain at all but guess what, we got over a half inch causing all the rivers to bump up and become extremely dirty. The first river we were on typically lowers as
quick as it goes up but for some reason it did not go down at all from 0700 to 1130. Once 1130 came around and only seeing one fish boil I made the decision to make a run south in hopes of at least one fish. Once on the root the visibility wasn't the worst I've seen it but it definitely was not ideal not to mention it was still extremely high. I directed Aaron on the areas to work with the fly rod then got Todd set up in a deeper hole that I knew had fish in it. About a hour into the second river I looked up and it appeared that Aaron was bowed up. Right before I asked if he had one on his fly line came shooting back at him. I asked if that was a fish and he told me he was pretty sure it was, then shortly after I heard him yell "a big brown just broke the surface!" (right where he briefly hooked up) Unfortunately he was not able to get another shot at that one. At about 1:30, while talking to Todd I took my eyes off of my float and when I looked back it was gone. Once I set the hook it felt like I drilled a rock but after a few seconds my rod started pounding with a large brown at the end. I handed off the rod to Todd and he spent the next 5mins battling a very healthy 15lb brown. After we got that fish in the net we gave it another hour with no other hook ups and decided to call it a day. With the odds stacked against us, I could not be happier with our 1-2 results seeing everyone else we talked to during the day had not even hooked up. The key to today's success was large spawn sacs and extra long leads under the float.
