It’s no news to fly fishers that autumn is the season for trophy browns. The males are in a feisty mood as they get ready to spawn, pumping up the hormones and turning brilliant shades of gold, yellow, and rust to attract and win a mate. They don’t like to be annoyed or distracted, and strike readily at any interloper that threatens their single-minded concentration. Who can blame them? The future of the species is at stake, and the bucks need food to fuel their procreative duty. Pity the poor field mouse who tumbles off a bank. He’ll be swallowed up, stuck in the belly of a brown like Jonah inside the whale.
I’ve spent many autumns trying to catch a trophy. I’ve come close, mind you, but browns are much trickier than rainbows or brookies. They’re one of the most genetically diverse vertebrates on earth, more varied in the wild than any population in the human race. Females produce about nine hundred eggs per pound of body weight, but most hens will perish before their first birthday, as will most males. A few lucky browns live longer, and some can hang on for twenty-odd years. Dame Juliana Berners described these trout as “right fervent biters.” I would agree.
We can thank Fred Mather for their presence in California streams. A New York angler and fish farmer, he attended a fisheries exhibition in Berlin in 1880 and met Baron Friedrich von Behr, who invited him to cast a line on his home waters near Baden-Baden in the Black Forest. Mather discovered that the native brown trout could cope with temperatures above seventy-five degrees. That convinced him they’d do well in the rivers of the eastern United States, where the water was gradually warming due to the destructive clear-cutting of forests after the Civil War. Brook trout, the favorite of fly fishers, were dying off, literally unable to stand the heat.
In 1883, the German ship Werra docked in Manhattan. In its hold were eighty thousand brown trout eggs on moss-lined trays. The eggs were dispatched to hatcheries on Long Island, and in Caledonia and Cold Spring, New York. The following year, the U.S. Fish Commission released forty-nine hundred brown trout fry into the Baldwin River, a tributary of the Pere Marquette in Michigan. California received its first shipment of fry in 1893. They were planted in coastal rivers and later cultivated in hatcheries to be dispensed around the state.
Anglers were eager to try their luck with the new species, but they soon began to grumble. Browns were not only trickier, but also pickier than brookies or rainbows, and more competitive, too, hunkering in the best lies and scaring off the opposition. But those anglers who did hook up were full of praise. Mary Trowbridge Townsend recounted in Outing Magazine (1897) how her brown’s “long dashes downstream taxed my unsteady footing; the sharp click and whir of the reel resounded in desperate efforts to hold him in check.”
She lost her trophy, alas. She managed to scoop the fish into the net, but the canny brown jumped right out to safety. I sympathized as I turned the pages, knowing the syndrome well. How often have I snatched defeat from the jaws of victory? Too often, in fact. But I’m not here to relate my own “one that got away” story, like those I read in Field & Stream as a boy at the barbershop. They’ve been a staple of angling lore since AD 200 or so, when the Macedonians first cast midge-like flies to the speckled trout that still swim in the Balkans today.
Instead, I intend to pass along what I hope are a few useful tips I’ve picked up while chasing browns, who are classified as negatively phototropic. That means they dislike bright light, which is why they lurk beneath undercut banks or in deep pools. In the fall, a sunny day is usually bad for attracting them, but browns perk up when there’s a layer of clouds, madly foraging to satisfy their voracious prespawn appetites. A heavy rain gets them on the move. The increased flow of water encourages them to migrate from lake to stream or river to feeder creek. They travel against the equivalent of a jet stream, and they’re tired and hungry when they stop to rest.
A big storm delivers a buffet of trout food. It blows or washes grasshoppers and other terrestrials into the stream, while a fair number of mice will be doing the backstroke, as well. A hungry brown craves nothing more than a fat, juicy mouse and will attack any reasonable facsimile. I’ve had some success with deerhair bass bugs fished close to the bank, twitching my rod to create the impression of a crippled or struggling rodent. A fly tyer in Sheridan, Wyoming, has created a foam-bodied pattern known as the Hantavirus Mouse — rodents being the carriers of said virus — that’s supposed to be deadly, though I’ve yet to try it myself.
When it comes to flies for autumn browns, I go very small or very large and don’t mess with the in-between. Hatches in October often occur midmorning, and Blue-Winged Olives are the most common insect on the wing. I fish such standard patterns as a Parachute Adams or a Baetis Quigley Cripple in sizes 18 to 22. They can be effective, but the trophy fish may hold out for a more filling meal, so I switch to a mouse pattern or a Beadhead Woolly Bugger in sizes 2 to 6. A Zonker, Muddler Minnow, or other streamer also will get the job done. There’s no such thing as going too big with spawning browns.
Color seems to matter. If the water’s a bit murky, I opt for darker flies. That defies common sense, and it’s not an absolute rule, but I stick to it. When the water’s clear, it’s off-whites I prefer.
I submit my tips with a disclaimer. I love to fly fish, but I’m not an expert. The only person I know who boasts about his expertise is Paul Deeds, my old fishing pal in the Alexander Valley. He’s always been a curmudgeon, but in old age, he’s become impossibly stuck in his ways. I still call him every month or so to keep in touch, ringing him on the same landline he’s had forever. He distrusts cell phones, Skype, WhatsApp, and every other item of technology post–World War II because, and I quote, “The government listens to every damn word you say.” What he’s hiding from Homeland Security is beyond me.
When I told him I might write about trophy browns, he sniffed, “You’re not qualified. You weren’t born in California.” That was a new one on me. “C’mon, Paul, that’s nonsense. I lived in the Bay Area on and off for almost forty years.” “Exactly. On and off! You’re still a greenhorn in my book.”
According to Deeds, there’s no way I could properly describe a quest for autumn browns, because the truly good fishing vanished from California around 1959, when he was a student at Montgomery High in Santa Rosa. He’s not so deluded that he’ll deny catching scores of gorgeous steelhead since then, and he’ll be out on the Russian again soon at the age of eighty, but he insisted that the Golden Age had passed long before I set up shop in San Francisco. He proceeded to justify this absurd theory with the tale of a trophy he’d caught with a streamer on the North Fork of the Yuba at seventeen while fishing with his dad, a prune farmer, like Deeds.
“Seven pounds, eight ounces,” he bragged. “They probably still have the photo tacked up at the grocery store in Downieville.”
“Somehow, I doubt it,” I countered. “I’ll bet it’s gone the way of carbon paper and DDT.” I let that sink in. “And besides, that’s not such a big fish. The record brown in California weighed twenty-six pounds, eight ounces. A guy caught it at Twin Lakes in Mono County in 1987.”
Deeds took a minute to consider. He didn’t sound happy. “Must’ve been something wrong with the scale,” he muttered and hung up.
