Not Your Typical Fish Story …
I know what you’re all thinking – just another fish story, courtesy of “B.S.” – but, let me assure you that the events you are about to read are frighteningly true.
Last week, I took a trip out to Little Averill Lake, a small glacially carved water body in northeast Vermont, to check on a hex hatch that used to happen there around the same time as ours at Back Lake. Well, it turned out that I did not see any hexes that night, but there were many, many small light colored mayflies on the water (very similar to a light cahill) and they were sitting there quite contentedly. That’s because there were no fish coming up to take them. Little Averill used to be stocked with rainbow and brook trout, in addition to the strong breeding population of lake trout. In the last ten or so years however, Vermont has stopped stocking rainbows there and I’m not sure if they put brookies in anymore either. What I saw that night, with the lack of concern from the local mayfly population, confirmed that perhaps there were no brookies there, as they surely would have been gorging themselves on the mayflies.
Just when all seemed lost, and I had decided to just spend the night out there on a beautiful early summer night, I saw a rise. No, two rises, maybe even three. I quickly tied on a small Usual, made one cast toward the cruising rise, and suddenly I had on a pretty good fish. While I hooked it in shallow water, it hastily pulled me in to deeper water ( I was in my kayak – imagine a north country “Nantucket sleigh ride” and you’ll get the picture). The fight was incredible, as it was a one hour long struggle to bring him off the bottom. By now, I was pretty sure that it was a laker that I had hooked, and my suspicions were confirmed when he finally surfaced and was brought to justice. Estimates were a 21″, 4 lb. laker that was tamed on a 4 weight fly rod with 5x tippet – not bad for my first laker on a dry!