Last weekend when I was fishing the middle stanislaus river I hiked and rock climbed my butt off and got into some pretty remote parts of the river and was catching ALOT of small rainbows around 8 inchers. One particular fish I got that day looked very different from the others, First it was only about 7 inches but very very colorful lots of par marks yellow belly and bright red stripe, very heavily spotted, the thing that was most odd about this fish was its eyes, they were defenitly like no other rainbow i have caught, They were almost twicce the size of all others i was catching and were really dark and all black, I mean really dark eyes. I think this was a golden or a rainbow/golden hybrid. Any opinions on this? It may have been my first golden ever but i'll never know for sure. Its so nice to fish for days at a time and see absolutly no trash, beer cans, worm containers I wish putah was managed as a catch and release wild trout river.
I don't believe the Mid Fork Stan has a population of goldens, but rainbows can vary greatly based on location. Even one river can have different strains/bloodlines that are very differently colored.
The description of the colors sounds like a golden trout, but it very well could be a hybrid or a different subspecies of rainbow trout. You said you were in a pretty remote section of the river. That could be a remnant of the native trout of the Stanislaus River. But, who knows?
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