The Ones that got Away

Fished the afternoon today with my friend Chris on a great section of the Clark Fork that I've been fishing a bunch lately. We headed up to a pool that we had seen fish feeding in a few days ago. Turns out there were still fish feeding and plenty of them. I wanted Chris to get hooked up with a nice fish so I gave him fly after fly until I started to run out of ideas. The fish were being picky and wouldn't take anything and we tried a stimulator, elk hair caddis, hopper, baetis and an ant pattern. Chris was doing a great job of presenting the flies but the fish were just not liking them. Then I gave Chris a small size 14 adams parachute which worked immediately as a fish smacked it on the first drift. Chris got a little too excited and snapped the fish right off. After that, the fish wouldn't take so I gave Chris a heavy golden stonefly nymph and pheasant tail and had him throw some nymphs. He had a few hits but couldn't connect with the fish. Then he put the flies right in the perfect place and as his flies sank, so did his fly line which was holding up on something. He set the hook and I watched as his line moved to the side almost directly upstream of us. Then the line came right in front of us and I saw an absolutely huge fish swimming slowly but strongly right past us downstream. It was a massive fish (it looked like a Bow) and Chris tried to keep the pressure on. The hook popped out and the fish was gone. After that I fished the pool a little bit and managed to pull out a few small bows on a simple BWO pattern.

                                            Chris fishing a nice Pool on the Clark Fork

While Chris switched to dries, I moved downstream to nymph a run that I had previously caught a nice rainbow in a few days back. Almost at the end of the run I watched as my line stopped dead in the middle of the fast water. I set the hook and the fish took off so fast it snapped my 5x tippet like nothing. I was really disappointed and I knew I had lost a nice fish. The rest of the time we fished we didn't get into any fish. We did discover some nice deep pools and runs upstream which I'll be going back to fish probably tomorrow. Overall it was a nice evening of fishing, even though we returned to campus having to tell our friends about the big fish we both had lost.