CSF Fishing in the Dark

2011 Game Tasting BanquetAs you may recall, one of the Silent Auction items at our annual Game Tasting Banquet this past January, was a guided fly fishing trip for trophy brown trout. Terry Keenan, from Indian River, was the successful bidder on the item. The outing was hosted by our own Northern Lights fly fishing guru, yours truly.

Since brown trout are most active after the sun goes down, we planned for an evening excursion, prefaced with a 90-minute crash course in fly fishing prior to nightfall. Terry had only a passing exposure to fly fishing, so we had our work cut out for us. He took to instruction eagerly and acutely. He is a man of focus, to say the least. Our chosen strategy was drifting hex duns over rising trout at twilight. But, if the hatch didn’t develop (as it often times doesn’t), our back-up strategy was to swing rodent imitations across glassy water, under the cover of darkness.

It was the latter of the two strategies that payed the bigger dividends. Before we left the stream at 1 a.m., Terry had hooked and landed two browns, the largest being 18-inches. But, as Terry will vividly recall, it’s the fish that we didn’t hook that will keep him up at nights! When this monster erupted, he sounded like a depth charge, and moved enough water to generate a minor tsunami! Unfortunately, he never made contact with our Low Rider mouse pattern to cause any damage.

Terry is a gamer, though. I asked if he was interested in trying it again, sometime. His reply came faster than the end of my sentence! “ANY time!”