by Mike Brown

Imagine yourself standing at the edge of your favorite piece of still fly water. The weather is immaculate and there’s not another soul anywhere within eyesight. You rest there quietly for maybe a minute or two watching the surface of the water for any sign of surface activity. Every now and then your eyes spy the occasional water ring, but you aren’t quite convinced those rings were made by a trout. And every now and then you see what you think is some kind of bug floating by that’s probably no bigger than a size 24 midge pattern, but again you aren’t really sure.

Then, in the middle of it all you see something bigger – no, you see something alot bigger and it was a lot more than just a simple ring – this was a boil, and you heard a distinct slurping sound when it came off. Without hesitation your body tightens, and every stillwater flyfishing lesson you’ve ever learned surfaces from the darkest confines of your memory. Your eyes squint, you square-up your shoulders, hunch your back, and your control hand begins furiously peeling line from the reel. You start false-casting toward the target – not too much though because you know if you throw out too much, you could easily end up lining any fish that might be directly under it. And as luck would have it, the trout gods have once again found you in their favor today; the imitation that’s hanging on at the business end of your fly line just happens to look exactly like the small bugs that you’ve seen occasionally float by.

At last you let the line fly rip out of your hand and it airs out perfectly. The leader piles up in a small, spider web-sized mound directly in front of the target, followed the fly lazily drifting downward behind it as if it had fallen naturally, right out of the sky. You’re feeling really stoked about your cast because you keep playing that boil scene over and over in your mind. “Man,” you think to yourself. “If that was a trout it must be huge, and he must’ve come up from the bottom. I’ll bet he doesn’t even know I’m here.”

Bigger trout aren’t stupid – particularly the really bigger ones – the experienced players; the ones that through the years have avoided falling victim to every fishing trick imaginable. I promise you; if a larger trout sees a fly line ripping through the air, he’s not going to assume that the fly line which just rocketed over his head is probably just some skinny tree branch that was blowing in the wind. He’s gonna be cautious. Hopefully, so will you.

Your midge taps the surface and rides undisturbed in the surface film, but nothing happens – at least not when you think it should. Just as you let your guard down and begin to convince yourself that you must have spooked whatever you had seen before, a small ring appears right about the same place where you landed that tiny midge. On an experienced hunch you tighten your fly line and slightly lift your rod tip. Your flyrod - which had been lifeless just seconds before, is now dancing full of life; bouncing from side-to-side, up and down and left to right. Your butt has clenched, your knees have gone weak and your pulse has started to race at breakneck speeds as the fish bolts back for the depths.

A few magnificent moments later, one of the sweetest wild trout specimens you’ve ever seen skips across the water and slides his way up toward where you’re standing. In your excitement you reach down for the trout. He’s the most beautiful trout you’ve ever seen come out of this water and he’s upset – no, he’s pissed off, and he wants to get away from you in the worst way. In order to accommodate him you hurriedly grab onto his midsection and hold on tight. He continues his argument by tightening hard against your grip and thrashing in a hundred different directions at once.

In an effort to release him quickly, you hold him tight against your shirt or your leg and remove the fly from the lip of the beast. He continues his futile attempt to free himself from your grasp, and as he does you hurriedly grab your camera from your vest and rip-off a quick picture or two before you kick him loose. You place your camera back in your vest and lower yourself to your knees. A matter of seconds later - and what has seemed like an eternity for the trout - he flicks his tail once and he’s off like a shot. And there you stand - spent, but satisfied knowing that you just bagged one of the finest trouts of your career.

This is how it plays out for almost every flyfisherman time and time again. It’s one of the oldest, coolest stories in the flyfishing book, but often times it’s the saddest.

In our rush of excitement, we all often slip up a little and to some degree mishandle the trout we catch from those beautiful waters that we love so much. We don’t do it intentionally; it’s just something that well, sorta happens in the heat of the moment. In this arena I’m no different than anyone else - regardless of how conscientious I am or how much stream time I might have on board. This kind of thing unintentionally happens to all catch-and-release flyfishermen once every now and then whether we realize it or not, and every so often we all need to be reminded of how we should (ideally) go about handling our fragile friends. Keeping in mind the old saying, “Nobody’s perfect,” I thought it might be a cool thing to refresh all our memories on how to appropriately handle a trout.

No matter the species (brown, brook, rainbow, golden or cutthroat), the trout is one of the most fragile of all the freshwater fishes. Its needs and requirements for continued survival are some of the most demanding of any freshwater game fish, and both it and its underwater habitat should be treated with respect. Like any other fish, trout possess a “slime” coating that protects them from acquiring disease and infection. Once the slime coating has been compromised, the trout is completely susceptible to invasion from a host of life-threatening illnesses and potentially deadly injuries. Here is a list of the top four immediate needs for optimum care of any trout:

Get the trout to hand as soon as possible. Overplaying a trout causes a potentially catastrophic build-up of lactic acid in the trouts’ tissues. Lactic acid is a very bad thing.

Help protect the trout’s slime coating by not handling the fish at all, if possible. If handling is necessary for whatever reason, it should only be done after completely wetting your hands. Handling should be kept to an absolute minimum. And please, don’t grasp the trout with a towel.

Keeping a trout out of the water is like keeping a human under water; breathing is impossible. The less time a trout stays out of the water, the better its’ chances for continued, post-release survival.

Once the fly is removed from the trouts’ lip, gently cradling the trout underwater in your open hands until it is ready to leave will help assure a safe release and continued survival for the trout. Allow the trout a few moments to collect its’ thoughts and gather its momentum, and it will run away from you faster than a car thief running from the cops.

Valid catch and release tactics are good for everyone and everything involved. Good C&R is an excellent conservation tool, and goes a long way to help ensure the possibility of maybe catching that same trout again in the future. The continued life of any trout is dependant on how we choose to treat it. Devout catch and release enthusiasts make every effort possible to help guarantee the continued survival of the species.

As a side note in fairness to those of us that like to keep the occasional brace of trout for supper, I’d like to say that it’s perfectly within your right to keep a few pan-size trout if you choose to do so; your possession of a valid fishing license and your strict adherence to any bag and possession limit or special regulations guidelines ensures that. Some people castigate those that keep a trout or two. I think what’s really ringing their bell is when they see that the sexually mature wild trout are killed and kept. Seeing mature, wild trout on a stringer or chain is one of the worst sights a devout C&R enthusiast and conservationist can imagine. Those particular trout are responsible for the future of what’s to be in that stream, river or lake. In this case I couldn’t agree more. As keepers and conservationists of both the water and our trout friends, we ask that we all please continue to be mindful of what we take from the water. The future of our fisheries absolutely depends on it.

See you upstream!

Mike Brown