August 20, 2008

Rory's tip

This is a week for great fish tales.

But before we get to the tales, here’s a quick rundown of hot fishing action:

Fishing is great in most high country lakes especially just before afternoon rain showers. The top spots typically deeper lakes like Big Lake, Willow Springs, Bear Canyon. Knoll and Chevelon Canyon, but Woods Canyon is a good spot for stringers of stockers;

• There is superb action for hard-fighting stripers along the Colorado River Lakes;
• Lake Pleasant is providing great fishing for hungry stripers and largemouth on topwater lures;
• Lake Pleasant is providing great fishing for hungry stripers and largemouth on topwater lures;
• Roosevelt might be on-again, off-again but it is THE place for bass (and catfish
• Alamo has turned on for crappies at night

Plus bluegills and other sunfish abound at all our desert impoundments and are great fun to catch for kids (or those who want to feel young again). Also, don’t ignore the plentiful yellow bass opportunities using KastMasters at Saguaro and Canyon lakes.

This is the season for warmwater fish in the high county. Try Willow Springs Lake for smallmouth, crappie and largemouth, Fool Hollow for bass, walleye and trout, Show Low Lake for big walleye, small bass, and decent trout, and Upper Lake Mary for walleye, pike, catfish and perch.  

We are moving into the last quarter of the waning moon, so expect better night fishing than last week when the moon was full. This is a perfect time to fish at night - just enough moonlight to see by, but submersible lights can still do their plankton-attracting jobs. This might be the tale end (or is that tail end) of the Perseids meteor showers, but you might see some spectacular shooting stars now that the full moon has past.

Also, I did have a great trip to Lees Ferry last week - the nymphing bite was terrific while drift fishing (especially near the dam), the weather was near perfect (a tad warm at times), the water temperature was hovering below 50 F (nothing like having chills and sweating at the same time) and my cameras got terrific work outs clicking away at one of the most scenic blue-ribbon trout fisheries on the planet. It’s an intense experience.

Ironically, this is the Ferry’s off-season for angler numbers, but one the most consistent times of the year to catch nice sized wild rainbows that’ll dance like a whirling dervish on the end of your line. Go figure. Thanks for the rainbow treat Terry (Gunn that is). The amount of fry in the river is phenomenal - this is one gargantuan age class of fish for the future.

Also, if you go swimming in the lakes this time of year to cool off and feel something nibbling you underwater, don’t be too surprised - bluegill like to nibble on folks. Sometimes it can feel like a small pinch that’ll make you say “Ouch!” Seldom do they break the skin, but these little sunfish can leave small welts. It’s nothing to be concerned about, it just feels like there is. 

Let’s get back to angler tales. We all know that anglers can sometimes stretch the truth like a well-used Bungee Cord, but modern day digital photography helps act as a truthometer of sorts.

With that in mind, I’ll forestall my usual tips to entertain you with two good fishing tales. See the story in the “Fishing News” below about the East Verde trout wars that should provide fishing incentives for others. It’s an entertaining fish tale penned by a skilled story teller.

Here’s the other story from a devout flathead angler who took a licking and kept on, well, reeling. 

The big flathead tale from Roosevelt:

After spending the day cooking in the sun and gathering a dozen or so bluegills, we anchored my pontoon boat up on a good spot, and waited.  

Just before midnight my pole was hit hard, and I jumped up and got into a really good fish.  So I fought it for a while, until I ended up on the front deck of the boat.  I had my arms doubled up on the rod, and the fish pulled straight down and under the boat.  At this point the fish had the upper hand, and I reached out as far as I could to get a better angle on it, and I leaned against the corner rail which has a speaker mounted on it.  You probably can guess where this is going… 

The fish made a really hard pull, and at that exact moment the speaker rotated (it’s designed to do this) and the other two guys on the boat came forward to where I was at, which dipped the front of the boat down.  Overboard I went head first.  And I went down several feet under, never touched bottom, and it took me a couple seconds to get myself righted and kick up towards the surface.  I lost one of my shoes, but held onto the rod.  It is hard to swim up when you have a 7-foot fishing rig in one hand, and shoes on!  But I finally surfaced, and one of the clearly shocked guys reached his hand down to help pull me up… and I promptly placed the rod in his hand and told him to keep on the fish!  While he did that I got myself up into the boat. 

He then said, “It’s gone.  The fish is gone,” and I saw the slack line.  Man was I disappointed.  But I took the rod and started taking up the slack line, and there it was!  Still there, under the boat! I fought for another 10 minutes or so, and finally got it on the boat.  The pictures pretty much sum it up. 

That's the short version, I'll do a much more descriptive and story-like version for my Website at www.azflathead.com.

Take it easy, and tight lines to you-

--Christian Polak

Fishing News

Pine man launches counter strike in fish war
28.5-inch E. Verde trout dwarfs catch by Strawberry man

Reprinted Courtesy the Payson Roundup by Pete Aleshire, Roundup staff reporter, Aug. 12

Let the wars begin.

And the mystery endures.

Pine and Strawberry are battling to the last clipped barb for bragging rights to the most absurdly, deliciously, ridiculously oversized fish caught in the East Verde.

Specifically, late last week Pine resident Jack Kearns went hiking up an almost dry stretch of the East Verde above the Rim Trails subdivision -- driven by the completely implausible triumph of a Strawberry man just a few days earlier, as reported on this page.

That earlier story reported that Aaron Cox, using a seductive little jig he'd perfected on steelhead in continent-sized Alaskan rivers, hooked and landed a monster 23.5-inch-long rainbow trout in a tiny pool on the East Verde just off the Control Road near Whispering Pines and Houston Mesa Road.

The thought of some Johnny-come-lately Strawberry transplant securing bragging rights to the Mogollon Monster of East Verde Trout riled Kearns, who has been fishing the stream for the past 15 years.

So he figured he'd try this one certain pool he knows on the East Verde. He ventured forth armed with his secret weapon -- a plastic grub, one of those corpse-white plastic buggers with a curly-cue tail that makes it dart and shimming when reeled in at the end of a spin cast rig.

He set out from near where the Control Road crosses the East Verde at Whispering Pines. Upon reaching the crossing, he discovered the road dry, indicating that the creek had gone to ground above the crossing.

No sensible man would have set off up a dry river hoping to catch a 23-inch trout.

But Jack Kearns is a fisherman: sensible don't apply.

He made his way to a spot upstream where he remembered a deep pool created by a little, improvised check dam.

He approached the pool carefully -- and just about swallowed his Adam's apple.

Moving through the three-foot deep, 12-foot-long, nine-foot-wide pool, he caught a glimpse of what looked like a monster trout. The theme from Jaws sounded in his head.

So Kearns jumped back, to avoid alarming the Great White Trout.

"Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. What am I gonna do?" he recalls thinking.

So he scurried around to the upstream end of the little pond and rigged his faintly disgusting plastic grub. Approaching on hands and knees to avoid spooking the trout, he cast blindly over the check dam.

"Hit it.

"Hit it.

"Hit it.

"Whomp," says Kearns.

The giant fish raced for the far end of the pool, where Kearns feared the six-pound test line would snap on the roots of an undercut tree.

The man and the fish waged a titanic struggle -- zim, run, reel, veer, pull, reel, run, zim -- until Kearns got it into the shallows.

He grabbed it, hands trembling with excitement.

He's lucky the monster didn't bite his thumb off.

Get this: 28.5 inches long.

The fish had a fiercely elongated lower jaw, a sign of great age and fierce appetites among trout. Odds are, that fish had been eating well for at least five or six years to reach such a size.

He was one prodigious fish. Mind you, the state record length for a rainbow trout is 32.5 inches. The record for a brown trout is 36 inches.

But which was it?

And how the heck did it get into the East Verde River -- stuck in a pool about as deep as he was long, isolated from the rest of the stream both upstream and downstream?

Kearns figures it was a German Brown Trout, given the speckling of dark spots, the hook jaw and the lack of any more than a suggestion of pink along its sides.

But what the heck is such a monster brown trout doing in the East Verde, since Game and Fish stocks the stream with only rainbows?

Could a wild brown trout have survived for five years on a stream that sometimes dries up?

Brown trout are voracious predators. They eat almost anything and could easily make a living on the hatchery-reared rainbow trout dumped constantly into the East Verde. Hatchery biologists say that in places that do have brown trout, the lunkers will come darting out of their hiding places and gobble up two 10-inch rainbows in one gulp.

But so far as they know, no brown trout live in the upper reaches of the East Verde.

Alternatively -- the Salt River Project has a pipeline that runs from the Blue Ridge Reservoir up on the Rim and dumps water into the East Verde, not far from where Kearns hooked his monster trout. Several days before he set out to show Strawberry who's boss, SRP tested a rebuild of that pipeline by letting 30 cubic feet per second loose in the East Verde. Could the monster brown trout have somehow gotten into the pipeline, avoided getting chopped up by the power generators and somehow come gushing out into the little stream?

Not likely, says John Diehl, manager of the Tonto Creek Fish Hatchery run by the Arizona Game and Fish Department.

In fact, Diehl thinks he can solve the mystery.

After seeing a photo of Kearns' trout, he said it looks like a Rainbow Trout to him -- which means the fish is only about four inches shy of the state record.

In fact, Diehl said the trout could be one of the "incentive" fish he stocked on the upper East Verde the day before Kearns' big catch. The hatchery each week puts out hundreds of fish, mostly 1- and 2-year-old pan-sized wriggler. But they also keep a pond in which they grow assorted trophy fish -- including lunkers bigger than 20 inches long that they dole out one at a time to the major stocked Rim creeks -- including the East Verde, Tonto Creek near Kohl's Ranch and Haigler Creek near Young.

The hatchery stops stocking Christopher Creek and the Lower East Verde in August.

Diehl noted that they're only stocking the uppermost reaches of the East Verde now as flows drop and temperatures rise. However, in another week or so SRP plans to again release 30 cubic feet per second into the East Verde, which would prompt a fresh round of stocking on into September.

In the meantime, Kearns has officially secured bragging rights as the Big Mucky Mucky Trout Fisherman of the East Verde.

Or as he put it as he drove off with a boy's grin and hands still shaking with excitement to ponder the $300 cost of stuffing and mounting the trout of a lifetime, "I wasn't going to let that guy from Strawberry get the best of me."

Rory’s note: Just to keep the fish record straight, the name “Verde Trout” has often been used as the nom de plume for the imminently catchable and edible roundtail chub, a native Arizona river fish found along the Verde River drainage. But don't jump to the conclusion that an East Verde Trout is really an urban economy-boosting roundtail subspecies that visits popular Western streams while sporting all the latest Orvis attire and gizmos.

By the way, we also could use more reel fish tales of the angler kind. If they are plausible (and sometimes when they just entertain and inspire), we might just run them. It’s all part of the fishing pantheon we all worship and enjoy.

Visit azgfd.gov.
http://www.azgfd.gov/h_f/where_fish.shtml