Brook Trout Heaven in New Hampshire

Every once in a while you have one of those days. You know what I'm talking about - those fishing trips that are so epic no one really believes you when reliving it.  Well, sorry to all those nay sayers, but what I'm about to share is no fish story -- rather it's one of those fishing adventures that we often only dream about.

 

I was home in New Hampshire for the opening of trout season (the 4th Saturday of April) at Duncan Lake, our family has a camp there and we've fished Opening Day of trout season there for years and years. The opening on our home lake was not as good as years past, and after a visit to the ER for a nagging upper respiratory infection, by Tuesday I was ready to try some other locale. My brother Marc and I loaded the canoe and headed to a nearby fly fishing only pond set in the Ossipee Mountains.

Less than five minutes after pushing off from shore, we had a double hookup of brook trout.  Marc was using a Prince Nymph or an olive Woolly Bugger. I was using a Golden Retriever.  The bite was on, and it remained red hot all all day.

 These were not your ordinary trout from the Fish & Game stocking program. These were big, fat and feisty brightly colored brook trout.

The average size of these fish was 15-17 inches. I'm not joking!
I've fished my entire life and have caught only one brook trout bigger than that - an 18" 3.1/4 pounder coincidentally caught in this same pond in 1999.
And now we were catching these brookies with great regularity.


Early on this morning, Marc hooked a big one... a really, really, big one.  As we did not anticipate finding ourselves in monster brook trout heaven at this pond, we did not bring a net -- and we could have really used it for this fish which we estimated over 20 inches.  Yeah, a brook trout over 20 inches.  He got it alongside the canoe but when attempting to lift it into the canoe, it shook it shoulders, snapped the tippet and slowly swam back to it's underwater home. At this point, we paddled back to shore, jumped in the truck and went to get a net... it would get much use over the next several hours.

Our manner of fishing was simple. Using sinking fly lines, we paddled around the lake slowly trolling the shoreline.  When we found a spot that consistently hit, we stopped, anchored and cast flies for awhile.  The trout cooperated with both tactics.

Fish on!

Total number of brook trout caught on Day1: 50

Total number of trout over 15 inches:  30





That's not a fish story. We caught 50 brook trout on the first day with 30 trout over 15 inches.  Never had either of us had a day like that on the water. Would the following day be as successful?

        YES !

We normally do not keep any fish, but this brook trout -- 19 1/4 inches and 3 3/4 pound went straight to the taxidermist and will soon be proudly displayed on a wall at Marc's camp in Maine.

My personal best was this 18 incher. Hopefully he (or she) will be an inch or two longer and a half pound heavier next time around.

We only fished three hours and brought 17 trout to hand.

As is my fly fishing tradition, we each ended our fishing with a trout on our last cast.