Wow, that must have been a fun day. Is anyone trying now and, of so, having any success? Also, when was the last brown caught that people know of?

Streamers work well. You just have to know where to pitch them. I use them year round. Last brown on PC? Last brown I hooked was a few years back. I have seen them tho. There are a rare few still left swimming around the lake.

 

- Nic  

-- Edited by Xnjb707X on Saturday 24th of March 2012 06:20:34 PM

Cole, I've read Kelly Galloup's book and seen his video.  I've thought of trying his technique at Putah.  However, the types of water he fishes are typically big like the Madison (where his lodge is).  Putah being a very small stream in comparision, I think you'd have to do a lot more walking than fishing in order to find places to use his techinque.  I have met a couple of people who have had success on Putah with streamers.  They were float tubing the pond-like water and using woolly buggers.  I've met them a couple of times and they seemed to do well, but this was several years ago.  Regarding brown trout, I landed a 23 incher in Nov of 2007.  The bad news was that it was foul-hooked near the front fin.  In any case, my indicator did go down, I was thrilled to fight it, and it was reassuring to know that big browns still existed in the stream at that time.

Nohackle, I definitely wanna check out Galloups stuff.  He uses shooting/sinking lines for most of his subsurface fishing.  I use a couple shooting heads for steelies over here so makes sense to transfer that to trout techniques.  One of the funnest ways to fish streamers,( been doing this for a few years now) is to chuck upriver against a big boulder.  Plop that sucker right in the back eddy behind the rock and start stripping downstream toward you as fast as you can.  Hold on to your rod and get ready.  Baitfish tend to flee downriver when something goes wrong.  The fish are used to seeing this and will hammer a fly fished like that.

I wonder if the PC, now almost 3 years Post Planting Era (PPE), really is a different fishery than during the Planting Era (PE). It seems like the success of streamers is a historical footnote. It will be interesting to see what everyone's experience will be.

As an associated interest, it will be interesting to see how dry fly fishing will change PPE. It seemed that last year there were quite a few, all be it small, fish making their splashy presence known during a hatch.

With the amount of crayfish and sculpin in that river, streamer fishing when done right in the right time of year can be very productive.