I fished the creek Saturday morning with chucktheduck. The flows had dropped quite a bit, and the fishing was tough. We came across a monster brown in a deep depression behind some rocks. Chucktheduck made a couple of casts to him when, out of nowhere, the fish rocketed out of the water right in front of us. That was too cool! We could see him feeding on something as he sat there in the slow current, but he wouldn't take anything. Oh well. I did manage to land three fish. Two of them were pretty small. The biggest fish to net was 15". A #18 micromay and a #24 midge did the very limited damage today.
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"Nothing makes a fish bigger than almost being caught."
I got up to Putah for the first time since this spring, been living vicariously through the board since then. Seems like the fish were concentrated in pods, if you found one you found a ton of them, the smaller guys anyway. When I arrived I watched as the guy just downstream of me was pulling one in. I looked a few moments later and he had another. He threw that back and immediately got into another. Every time I turned around he had a fish on, in hand or was just tossing one back in, pretty impressive when you watch someone who knows what they're doing. We ran into eachother a little bit later and he gave me a few pointers on indicator fishing and sure enough it was a charm, but it seemed like you either had a lot of activity or none at all depending on the location. The fish were all small, all native & deeply colored, feeding aggressively, and extremely hard fighting when hooked.
I went back to fish the hole he had been working but two others (guy and woman) had already moved in, I was curious how they might have done after the spot had already yielded a fish on every cast just 30 minutes earlier. I tried some other sections of the stream but with no luck at all.
I wonder a bit about how fish behave when the flows drop, if I were a little fish I don't think I'd want to be hanging around anywhere near a big brown or rainbow that might want to make a snack out of me. Some of the big browns in Putah could make a meal out of even a 15" or 16" rainbow if given the opportunity. A guide up on the Truckee once told me of casting to a 16" rainbow trying to get it to hit when out of the depths a giant brown lunged out, grabbed the big rainbow, and swam off with it for dinner.
The brown we saw could have easily taken a small trout for breakfast. It's mouth was huge. I had a small rainbow on at one point that swam straight for the big brown. I started thinking, "Man, this could get interesting." But the beast didn't seem very amused.
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"Nothing makes a fish bigger than almost being caught."
