Big Red

I fish. I fly fish - for trout. I'm not a fanatic about it. I don't have a huge amount of gear and I've never taken a trip to some exotic locale to fish (although one day I might - and I'm not counting the family trip to Bimini when I was 10), but every once in a while when I have a free day, or a few free hours, I'll call a friend or two and we'll hit one of the local rivers.

This past Saturday I went fishing with one of my friends. I'll call him S. S and I went to fish a river that I had never fished before - he had fished there once prior. I'm withholding the name of the river for reasons that will shortly become apparent. We fished different sections of the river for a few hours, but the vast majority of our time was spent on one particular area. We didn't catch anything, but it was one of the best days of fishing I've had in a while - all because of Big Red.

S saw it first. It was the biggest rainbow trout either of us had ever seen up close. In this particular river, there are long stretches of steep rocks/rapids broken up by small pools where there are some fish. The fish can not move easily between pools when the water is low, like it has been recently.

S tried catching it with a hopper (dry). He said the fish came up rather quickly and looked at it, but decided not to bite. After that it ignored whatever he threw at it. He eventually walked up to where I was fishing to tell me about it. I thought he was exaggerating about the fish's size. I mean, I hadn't even seen a fish in this river yet, so how big could this one be? We walked back to the pool S was fishing in and didn't see it anywhere. The water was crystal clear so we were sure we weren't missing it. Eventually, we gave up and just started fishing.

I walked downstream a bit and started casting a stone fly nymph. I'm not sure what I was casting at because I still hadn't seen any fish yet. I cast several times as I let my mind wander - then I saw it. His huge red stripe stood out like Old Glory. He was about 15 feet away and was rather still. He was the Nautilus waiting to fill his prow with an unsuspecting meal. He had to have been at least 2 feet long, likely more. (I realize by western United States standards this dimension is not "huge," but here in the eastern US, it is. The biggest rainbow I've ever hooked was about 18" and he slipped off the hook as I beached him, so I never got to actually hold him.) I was as still as the boulder I was standing next to. All I could mutter was, "Oh my God!" He was every bit as big as S described him and then some. He looked like the Steelheads that you see on that National Geographic special where the big Brown Bear stands on a boulder and waits for a salmon to jump into his mouth. (Incidentally, the Pacific Steelhead and our hatchery-raised Rainbows are actually the same species. The difference here is that they don't ever go out to sea.)

S heard me and slowly walked back over. We watched him for a while. At one point, he came up to eat something off the surface of the water. Unlike most trout that make a quick splash and rapidly duck down below the sufrace, this guy slowly came to the surface and gulped in a mouthful of water and whatever bug he was trying to eat. It was like watching a whale come up to take a peek at a tour boat - pure grace in the turblence of the water. The fish was so big, rather than the basic curved left-right-left motion of smaller trout, it moved in an articulated motion as it hovered back to its "bed" .

I cast the stone fly upstream from him 3-4 times. It gradually dropped below the surface and floated by. The fish completely ignored it each time. He wasn't changing position very much, so I took the time to change to a dry fly - a pretty big one. He ignored it too. S tried an emerger, no bite. He eventually got spooked and hid under some laurel branches so we ignored him for about 10-15 minutes. We came back and he was out in the open again. We tried a few more times to catch him, but he was ignoring everything. It seemed as though he was even ignoring us! Eventually, we realized it wasn't going to happen. We gave up trying to sneak around. We just wanted a really good look at him.

I decided to see what would happen if I got close to him. I slowly started making my way towards him. There was no sand or silt in this part of the river - the bottom was solid rock - so my movement didn't stir up anything. I took my net and put it down in the water which was between 2 and 3 feet deep where he was resting. I slowly stepped towards him, an inch at a time, keeping my net slightly in front of me and to the left. My arm in the water up to my elbow, my waders tightened around my knees, then up to my hips. I eventually got the net to within about 8 inches of him. He was facing directly into it. The current kept pushing the net inside out and I was afraid the webbing would hit him and scare him off if I got any closer, so I planned to net him from there. He was gone before I was even sure I had moved. Had I four arms, each one brandishing a net thrice as large, it would have made no difference. He was a magician, a trickster, a master of the martial arts who anticipated my move. S was about 15-20 feet away on a boulder, towering above. He said it dodged the net off to my left and in a quick zig-zag-zig, he was all the way at the top of the pool in less than a second. I'm sure he was gloating.

We wanted him sooooo bad. This area is catch-and-release, but we had cameras and wanted pictures! We named him "Big Red" to denote his prominent coloring. I don't know when I'll get to fish again, but when I do I'm headed back that river, hopefully with my own bag of magic tricks.