I have found the fish that will haunt my dreams if I’m unable to catch him before I leave. It was a nice sunny day yesterday, so I sped north as soon as work was over to get to the south branch in time to have an hour or so to fish. It was nice and calm in Christchurch, but the wind was whipping over the pass and down teh gorge where the river is. I thought I may have screwed the pooch by going so far only to be blown out, but I hiked up and around a bend and the wind was PERFECT. It was blowing upriver just a bit, and across the inside of my casting arm’s elbow. Effortless 70’ casts, and perfect drifts. The sun was just still high enough that I was able to see into the water very well. I got to a small pool that had a gravel bar that separated it into 2 sides (the bar was still a foot under water, with ~4’ on either side) and a steep incline on river left. I couldn’t see deep into the eye of the pool so I climbed up the side and onto a rock overhang about 15-20’ above the water. Thank goodness I did… there he was - a big nasty brown trout well into the double digits… the biggest I’ve seen so far. He was sitting on the bottom in some pretty good current right in the eye of the pool. I could see his size, and that it was a big fish, and then he rose up to look at something on the surface and I got a lump in my throat when I truly realized his size. He was directly below me, so I eased back from the edge and picked a good landmark for a casting reference in case I couldn’t see him from the lower angle once I was back in the river.
I headed back around and into the water, eased my way up, and he had dropped back about 30’ onto the tip of the gravel bar and was very shallow. He wasn’t interested in the blue dun I had on (they were hatching all over) so I put on a pheasant tail nymph to see if he wanted that. No dice. He had moved around a bit while I was doing this, and ended up back in the deeper hole. I though I had surely put him off by dragging a flyline through his lair so many times, so I eased back o
