The Hold 'Em Hole

Asher and I had caught a half a dozen or so trout in a half hour or so and had missed several others, so action had been decent. The hole he is fishing in the picture above made the afternoon, though.

We'd make a couple of downstream casts and had worked our baits back through the current without bites when I cast my Road Runner Marabou downstream and across the current, let the lure sink in the eddy until it caught the current, and then held it still while it swang out into the current. I was holding the rod tip motionless when a fish smashed my lure. I battled what I thought to be a really big fish initially because of the current and landed a solid rainbow.

After releasing that fish, I told Asher that I hadn't been working my lure when that fish hit and then repeated the cast to demonstrate. Just like it was scripted, as I told him I was "just letting it swing out into the current like this" another trout slammed my bait in the same place.

As you might guess, I hadn't even landed my fish yet when Asher mimicked the cast with a Lindy Watsit Grub, and before long he was fighting a trout of his own. And so it went. I think we ended up catching releasing nine from that run before they finally quite biting.

We fished a bit farther downstream and had a couple of other strikes, but the afternoon was fading so we soon had to call it an afternoon and begin walking toward the car. I'm curious now whether the fish were just ridiculously wadded up in that one hole or whether we simply didn't discover the right "non-presentation" until we got to that particular hole. I guess we'll never know!