Another enormous Gunpowder brown trout showed itself to take a nymph presented by Gunpowder River Guide Jeff Lewatowski. The big trout struggled in every possible way, and despite swimming under numerous rocks and making deep runs was successfully landed on 6X tippet.
The brown measured out at twenty inches and Jeff estimated the weight of the fish at four pounds. This video still photo is from an upcoming video short of the exciting catch.
We barely had time to recover our nerves when I set the hook on the heaviest eighteen inch Gunpowder rainbow I have seen, but as Jeff tried to get into net position the hook pulled free. Days earlier, Gunpowder River angler, Matt Devlin, hooked and landed a seventeen inch brown on a size 18 midge pupa. Jeff’s and Matt’s fish fish are the most recent in a number of browns over sixteen inches that I have seen on the line, landed or photographed this year.Caddis are hatching in so many numbers it can be hard to ignore them. The trout may rising and slashing at adults, but are feeding heavily subsurface on caddis larvae and pupae. The rising flows have dislodged a lot of log jams, and pushed a lot of debris and bugs downstream. Big nymphs, brighter patterns and tiny midge pupae are producing four to six fish in each good riffle or pool. Weight and the distance between flies and indicator are the two biggest factors in reaching the fish and detecting the strike.