Complete White River Fly Fishing Website

The first thing I wanted to do is take her down to the boat ramp and stand on the concrete while watching her cast. My aim was to try and help her feel the rod load properly so that she could get the hang of distance-casting before we made our way to the lake’s upper reaches. Summer was doing really well right off the bat, so we didn’t practice for very long before we decided to park up by the Chutes. We hoped to fish the big hole as our first spot. Well, we didn’t get lucky with respect to that hole, and now I’m glad, because we probably wouldn’t have caught the big fish if we had started where we wanted to – fate has a strange way of working sometimes. Catching a huge trout really boils down to being at the right place at the right time - or should I say, on that night, everything came together perfectly. As we were walking down to the Point, I noticed two people at the end of the Big Hole, and there were a few people just downstream of the Rebar Hole. The only spot open was in between those two places. We walked out just past the Gauntlet shoot and started fishing. I tied a black wooly bugger with a gold bead on Summer’s line, and I was prepared to fish my go-to night pattern, the Electric Blue Boogaloo. I started fishing with her standing behind me, so she could get an understanding of the presentation and what to look for when a fish strikes. I really wanted to emphasize to her how important it was to effectively set the hook by pulling the rod down and to the right – if Summer couldn’t execute this setting technique, she was going to lose a lot of fish. After watching me make a few casts and observing the swing of my fly, she was ready to try it on her own. Summer walked twenty feet upstream of me and started fishing. Both of us had two different flies tied on in an effort to see which one was going to do the trick. We both had a few hits and missed the fish, but luckily for us, none of those bites were “the fish”. I’m glad she got her misses out of the way on the little ones anyway. After about ten casts while working the same water, I decided to switch up and throw another one of my patterns that I have had quite a bit of lot of luck with - a wooly bugger tied on a TMC 5263 with a black tail, black hackle, and tinsel flash chenille (olive) for the body. On the second cast, I hooked into something big, and I knew it was uncommonly large because of the heavy weight I felt on the end of the 6-weight Sage XP I was using that night. The fish never really made a strong run; instead it just hung around close, swimming back and forth. It took me about ten minutes to land this behemoth, and I didn’t use a net because I think it’s easier to gently glide bigger ones into shallow water. This monster probably weighed between 10 and11 pounds with a 20-inch girth –one of the biggest rainbows I had ever seen, and its girth was impressive. You will hear people say that a fish looks like it swallowed a football, and in this case, that description was spot on. What a fish that was, and I would have been content with landing a rainbow like that - even if I didn’t catch another trout.

After releasing that trophy rainbow, I wanted to tie on the same pattern for Summer, to see if that was the big fish fly for the night. Being the gentleman that I am, I gave her my hole where I had just caught that huge rainbow so that she could have a shot at catching her first nighttime trout. She was fishing a new Sage SLT 5-weight that I had bought for her, and it was her first time using it. I walked about twenty feet downstream and started fishing again, and when I heard a splash coming from Summer’s direction, I asked if she had a fish on the end of her line. As I was talking to her, she told me it had come off. So, I repeated my earlier directions to make sure she sets the rod down toward the water in order to lodge the fly in the corner of the fish’s mouth. On her next cast, she told me she had a fish on again, and this time it felt big. I immediately started to reel my line in so that it wouldn’t get in the way, and while I was walking out of the water towards her, she reiterated that this one felt big. Summer asked me to hold the rod to see what I thought. After I grabbed the rod, the fish took off and got into the backing in a matter of a few seconds. At that point, I knew that this fish was a giant, but I couldn’t tell exactly how big it was. Because I realizedthat there were two guys still down at the Big Hole, I hollered at them to move, as this fish was heading downstream and there was no way I was going to turn it. I was literally running downstream with this fish as I was yelling at them because I did not want the fish to get too far from me or it would have been ten-times more difficult to land. When I got close to the other fly anglers, I came to realize that it was Leonard guiding a client. I’m glad it that it was him because he is a very understanding guy. At that moment, I was standing at the end of the Point where the water drops off into the deep pool – then, I knew this fish was mine. I wish Summer had landed the fish, but she was scared, and panicked after she hooked it. She needed help, and it is my job to take care of my honey. The big brown took a team-effort to land, and this battle only took about twenty minutes. This fish only made one strong run, and it dogged around close, fighting its heart out until the bitter end. If we would have hooked this fish in the daytime, it would have fought for twice as long, and big trout are a lot easier to land at night. Once we landed the brown, we measured it, took a few pictures, and released it to live another day. This monster was caught on 3x Rio fluorocarbon tippet, and it measured 29-inches long with an 18-inch girth. I guess you can say that Summer has some luck on her side when it comes to hooking up with big fish. That is a good thing, and I think I’ll take her more often. I was so proud of her, and I don’t know of any females who have ever caught a fish of this size on Lake Taneycomo or any of the public river systems here in the Ozarks, for that matter. I also think that this is the biggest brown caught that year (2007) at night. My estimates would put this fish between fifteen to eighteen pounds. What a fish and what a story! Two extraordinary trophy trout – one a rainbow and one a brown -were caught within ten minutes of each other. We called it a night after the brown because it was a fitting end to a perfect experience. Odds are, we would not have caught anything bigger, and who wants to catch a dink after landing a fish of a lifetime? We wrapped it up around 12:30am.