Tag Archives: small streams wild brown trout

Three Small Stream/Wild Trout Best Practices for Fall 2023

As the weather turns cooler, small stream anglers begin dreaming about their favorite thin blue lines. It should be a great fall season — we had a very wet summer and the natives and other wild fish are in great shape. But along with fishing for wild trout and char comes great responsibility, to both the fish and the resource. Here are three things you can do preserve and protect wild fish.

Minimize fish photos. Anglers with cameras have needlessly killed more small stream wild trout — intentionally or not — in the last 10 years than in the previous 100. You can blame it on the convenience and portability of digital devices. You can blame it on social media. Or angler narcissism. Or all of the above. One solutions is: take no photos, or Take The Wild Trout One Photo Challenge.

Accordingly, do you really think we need a photo of every wild fish you caught on your last outing? Dr. Rick gives the same answer: no.

Be on the lookout for redds. Fall is spawning time for wild brookies and brown trout. Learn how to identify a redd, the nesting area for spawning fish. And please, stay out of the water. The eggs you don’t crush will be the trout you’re catching in a couple years.

Keep Fish Wet. Catch-and-release is useless if you’re ignoring its fundamental best practices. Learn to do it right, and you’ll have more wild fish to catch on your next outing.

Thank you and tightest of lines.

Small stream report: hiding in plain sight

I had the pleasure of fishing with Toby Lapinski earlier this week and even though it’s that time of year, our quarry was not striped bass, but rather small wild trout and char. This brook was new to me, so I was stoked to be on undiscovered waters. The stream is overgrown with briars and saplings, to say nothing of the broken limbs and downed trees that seemed to be everywhere. It had riffles, glides, plunges — a nifty combination for a brook that is in some places small enough to jump across. (That’s, of course, if I could get a running start. And not be wearing waders. And be 20 years younger.) Funny thing! I’ve driven past this brook hundreds of times and never knew it was there.

I was hoping these schools of fry in the sunlit shallows were YOY browns or brookies. But no. They’re black nosed dace YOY, maybe a couple centimeters long. Did you know that some scientists think that the eastern BND spread after the last ice age from a single colony in present-day Connecticut?
Not a bad bit of camo. You get the sense of the wildness of the place. I’d estimate the water to have been medium-high — remember, this was my first time here — which is a good spring flow, but we had bright sunshine and no canopy working against us. We saw midges, and there was also a decent hatch of small (16-18) tan caddis. Some of the sexiest runs and holes were surprising blanks, like this one. There’s always next time. Photo by Toby Lapinski.
Toby captured the largest fish of the outing, this vibrant char. We both fished a dry/dropper, and while Toby had some takes on the dry, all of my action came on the dropper, which was 2x short size 18 BHPT. I also tried some micro streamers, but had no takers. I highly recommend a dry/dropper setup on a new stream. It’s the fastest way to find out what the fish want. Photo by Toby Lapinski.
Small stream wild browns like this are fearsome fighters. It’s almost like playing a minute smallmouth bass. I pricked several more little browns on the tiny dropper nymph.