Before the downpour of rain on Friday, I was able to make it out to a small stream.  We’ve been getting a ton of rain over the last few days, and a lot of freestone rivers in Massachusetts are well above their typical flows, which makes wading difficult.  On one hand, I’m anxious to fish the Millers river and the Westfield River in Chesterfield, but I’m also thankful for the amount of rain we’re receiving.  I hope this will help keep the trout healthy and happy throughout the heat of the summer.

The upside to all this rain is that small streams are doing quite well. I decided to spend my time on Friday at one of these streams.  Over the winter, I actually found out that this stream surprisingly held some huge trout.  While most of the trout range in the 8-12″ length, there have been a few instances over the last few months in which a few fish have easily broken my 6x tippet.  Another large trout took off upstream, taking about 35 feet of line with it, before jumping and shaking the fly.  Needless to say, I’ve seen how large the trout can be here, and the way they act when hooked makes me think it doesn’t happen very often, if at all.  On Friday, I finally brought one of those chunky trout to the net.  This one was about 16″ or so.  You can imagine my surprise when pulling in this trout, because this is a stream you could practically jump across in certain spots.  It fell to tightlining one of my custom tied flies within the first 15 minutes I was there.  The rain really started to come down about 30 minutes later, and I caught one chub before calling it a day.

Big brown from a small stream