Posts tagged ‘Brown Trout’
True North Trout is pleased to publish Part I of the most extensive interview that we’ve done — with angler and fly guide Tommy Lynch (“The Fish Whisperer”). Tommy guides as part of the Hawkins Outfitters guiding team, and specializes in the Pere Marquette River, though he fishes all over the state. Tommy is an Orvis-Endorsed Fly Fishing Guide, and has been at the guiding game for about 15 years.
In this first part of the interview Tommy talks about indicator fishing for steelhead, Spey casting, and night fishing for brown trout with mouse patterns. Look for Part II of the interview in the next week.
More information about Tommy is available at his website and at Hawkins Outfitters. Tommy is one of the top guides working in Michigan and the information he has to share is quite valuable.
T|N|T: According to your website, before you decided to become a fishing guide you were going to college to become a funeral director, which I understand is your family’s business. Was it difficult to walk away from both a solid profession that would have promised financial security and from “the family legacy,” so to speak? How did you come to make that decision?
T|L: Nope, wasn’t a hard decision at all. I have two brothers in that business, but there are simply more smiles in this line of work. I like living happy! My father and I decided in an Irish, highly-toned conversation one day that I could certainly be a decent funeral director, but I would never love it like I loved fly fishing. He was right on both counts, as he usually is.
That's Tommy on the right with his friend, Mr. Big Trout.
Fly fishing is like nothing I had ever experienced, with the possible exception of sex. It just wasn’t the sort of thing that I was able to walk away from or put away and then take out again on the weekends. Once I did it, I had to continue. Every day that I didn’t fish, I felt as if I was digging myself into a hole that would have to “fish myself out of” eventually.
Besides — to be a great funeral director — like my father and my brothers — you have to become a responsible, well-dressed, and clean-shaven member of society … all overrated achievements in the eyes of a trout bum.
I caught a bass at age four in my Uncle Fred’s private pond in New York. But my father didn’t take me to the Pere Marquette River until I was seven years old. He used to tell me, “Tommy, I took you to the river when you were seven, and you never really came home!” My pop was right, and in some way he always encouraged me to do what I loved because he saw that I would be very lucky guy, if I could. In a way I still feel like I am part of “the legacy,” just a different part of it now, as many of my uncles and cousins will come to fish with my father and with me every September. I hope that tradition continues for generations to come.
T|N|T: You mention on your website that you were the first guide to do “chuck & duck”-free, floating-line-only steelhead trips on the Pere Marquette. I remember a time when guides and fly shop owners alike would tell you that “chuck & duck” was the only way to catch steelhead reliably, especially in cold weather. I take it that’s no longer the case. What led you to the decision to not use the “chuck & duck” method?
T|L: “Chuck & Duck” has its uses on the bigger rivers where strong casting might be a problem for clients who have never moved a fly line before — much less 50’ of line with a mend! That being said the best “big river” fly guys I know are now running center-pin versions of indicator techniques – including several of the guys on the Hawkins crew, like Jon Ray and Ed McCoy.
This technique is even easier to apply than small water rollcasting, thanks to the overall size of the water fished on the major tailwaters Also tailwater fisheries get that heavy stocking much more than the smaller streams, and of course the P.M. mainstream gets zero plants, but has one of the best natural returns and reproduction in the Midwest.
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World Record Brown Trout
Word is in today that a possible world record brown trout was landed today on the Manistee River. The Ludington Daily News is one of the first to carry the story. Eric Sharp at the Detroit Free Press provides details as well. The Michigan DNR has certified it as the new Michigan record brown trout, weighing 41 lbs., 7.25 oz. It measures out at 43.75 inches in length.
Tom Healy from the Grand Rapids area landed the fish. His charter guide was Tim Roller. The fish was caught on a black-and-silver Rapala Shad Rap crankbait. The angler was using a Cabela’s XML spinning rod and Cabela’s Prodigy reel loaded with 30-pound braided line. They were targeting salmon when the brown attacked the crankbait. The fight lasted fifteen minutes.
Although the fish has not been declared a world record, the official weight puts it over the previous “all tackle” IFGA world record brown trout of 40 lbs., 4 oz. — a fish caught by Howard Collins on Arkansas’ Little Red River (a tributary of the White River) in 1992. Given the extensive and professional documentation of this fish by DNR fisheries biologists, however, it is hard to see how it could not be declared the world record.
