Fishing For Bait: A Flyfisher’s Resolve

We are pleased to bring you our first guest post here on the AnglerGang fishing blog. This post is brought to us by the always funny, trout junkie Owl Jones!

“This site is lousy with pike anglers!” I shouted to my wife, who was in the kitchen banging around pots and pans and windchimes from the sound of it. She didn’t answer back. I clicked the page labeled “pictures.” There, in photo after photo there was one grand fish after another. Pike, bass, salmon, steelhead and one really cool tattoo.

“I’m not sure I’m really worthy to be Guest Blogging on a site like this” I said. Clank. Clink. Bang. I clicked the tab marked “Blog” and began to read. The only problem was that I couldn’t read because of all the great pictures of incredible fish. “I mean, does everyone that writes something here have a photo with a massive fish?” Clink, bang, plunk.

It would be a romantic notion to say that every time we fished our mountain streams here in the Southeast that all we caught were beautiful little brook trout. But the truth is that every once in a while, we do get a monster fish – at least by Southern trout fishing standards, and I do have a couple of nice photos. “I might be able to get this past those guys at Angler Gang after all!”

“What are you going on about in there?” my wife asks. I mumble something about writing and the need for a little quiet. Wham! Thud! Bang-rang-blang-bam! I dig my head deeper into the glow of a warm, humming laptop and search for the photo of a nice brook trout I caught and released several years ago.

Ah,…there it is. This one is almost worthy. It will have to do. The colors aren’t as bright as they were in person, and there’s an unflattering glare from the sun..but it will have to do. It is a brook trout, after all, and it looks as if no one at Angler Gang has ever seen one before. Sure, they have your giant salmon, monster pike and big fat yellow perch…but not a brook trout.

“Are you looking at LOLCats in there?” my wife yells from the back guest room. I’m giggling now, thinking about the big brookie and that day. My friend and I each got one as big, and several that were a little smaller. All like brook trout colored footballs. But I disect. Regress. whatever….

And so, I present this fish to you – the Angler Gang faithful.A very respectable brook trout by Southern standards and a fish that makes our wild trout look like a can of opened up, dried up, year old sardines. This massive brookie isn’t the fish we’re normally after as we sit at our fly tying desks into the wee hours of the morning lashing feathers and tinsel to bare hooks….but he’ll do. He will certainly do.

It’s photos like this one that remind me of all those little five and six inch trout that more often find my fly – the little jewels of the Blue Ridge Mountains that we’re destined to catch, and that I’m resolved to forever love. That is, until I finally take a trip for steelhead or salmon. “Honey, come look at these giant fish!”