Made it back up to the Whites for turkey day again this year. Daryl and I hit Reservation Lake on Tuesday in great anticipation of big browns. Needless to say they didn’t disappoint us. We saw a brown that was bigger than the 10 lb’r Daryl landed last year. It looked like a shark. There were at least 9 other big browns of 5 lbs or bigger along with her. Hammer, rock, scissors gave me the first shot so I tied on a egg sucking simi and went to work on her. The hard part of the situation was not buggering all the others around her with a cast and not let one of the smaller guys get to it first. I had about 6 shots at her and finally a fish of 6-8 lbs ate the fly. Unfortunately she was coming right at me and opened her big white mouth and the fly popped off. That was the end of that. They all vanished not to be seen agian in 5 days. We managed to pick one up around five pounds on an egg pattern, nice fish but not what we came up for.
We went back again the next day and never saw the big fish all day. Caught lots of rainbows but no big browns. Hit Hawley on Thanksgiving and lasted until about 1 pm. The big browns were in there again but didn’t seem to be in the thick of the spawn as much as last year. They didn’t hang around very long. The snow and wind got pretty brutal that day so we headed in early and met up with Bobby Domings. Bobby was nice enough to let us stay with him and whipped up a great turkey dinner to boot.
We fished for the next few days at Hawley, Reservation, Crescent and Tunnel and caught fish everywhere but the big browns eluded us this trip. Crescent was the highlight with the spawning brookies and fat chunky rainbows up to 18″s on simis off the dam.
The water temp’s weren’t that bad so I think it will be awhile before the lakes freeze up especially if the winds continue. Should be enough time left for one more pass at the big boys. I’d love to see that shark again.