Heart break hotel (stories of despair)

Billy

Billy

Big poppa
Staff member
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I thought this would be a fun thread. Tell your stories of the ones that got away. Those fish that leave you shaking and wanting just another chance to replay what went wrong. I'll start.

Yesterday I was on a mixed bag lake that I know grows the occasional big rainbow. It's a challenging lake with good depths and productive shallows and just has a mysterious feel to it's depths. Because it's got largemouth the rainbow density is low. It's not uncommon to have only a small handful of strikes.
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I was throwing a big olive craw jig on a type five which has become my go to set up for lakes where I may catch bass, carp, walleye or whatever else as well as rainbow.
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A solid hour went by with nothing. I was pondering fishing a sister lake which would require a short portage. I was out over deep water but drifting towards shallow. I made a long cast and started a slow strip and pause retrieve.

Just as I started working the fly up the incline and was nearing the end of the cast my day dream was interrupted by the type of strike that can steal your rod. No hook set was needed as I was fast into a big, pissed fish. This thing went from down deep to flying into the sky and I got my first glimpse of a rainbow that I would guess would top over 8 pounds.

Countless jumps and runs later and I started pondering how I was going to land such a fish. At one point the rainbow made a jump that almost put her in my lap. I was cursing myself for not replacing the net I had lost weeks ago. I would need to go ashore I thought to myself. I let up on pressure just a touch to kick towards the shallows.

She was gone. No line break. No hook break. Nothing. It just popped off delicately and I watched her swim down into the depths.

I had her at my feet and then just like that she was gone. The shaking of my hands remained for several minutes as I replayed the fight over and over in my mind. Smile on my face.

Your turn💔
Billy
 
When I first started fly fishing I spent as much time as I could at Lake Lenice. I decided to kick around one full moon night in a float tube dragging a mouse pattern. With the moon coming up over the Columbia, lighting up the water, I watched a huge brown come up and eat the mouse. I only had it on the line for a few seconds then it was gone. The image is burned in my mind
 
My shakes and tremors are the result of swinging flies one nov day on the NF Nooksack. I'm about halfway through the tail out of a beautiful run, where the V is accelerating, getting narrow and the edges are frothy.

I land my just in the frothy shit across the V from me, and before I can even start the swing I snag up. I give it a couple pulls and that snag starts screaming upstream. It's going so fast that the line being ripped upstream is singing as it cuts through the water. In a flash it's gone from 15° downstream of me to 45° upstream. Never having seen anything like it, I started chasing it upstream. Bad idea, that put a slack in the line and it popped off. Never saw it, but the way it moved was awe inspiring. If you know the NF nook, it is heavy ass water and this fish cut through it like a pond. My gut says 20# of chum, but could have been a big ass bull or a sturgeon or a submarine for the way it swam.

Theres also the enormous smallmouth I hunted in an urban pond last spring. I saw it half a dozen times, @Josh receiving panicked texts every time she showed herself. 4-5 pounds of Bellingham bronzeback beauty. I had a handful of sight fishing refusals that nearly killed me.

One day I saw her disappear into some weeds, and shot a cast in there. First strip came tight like I had snagged weeds, and the exploded. Fully corked 8wt, graphite straining and shes dancing all over the pond. I was using a cricket my uncle had tied god knows how long ago, and the hook snapped at the bend. Never saw her again, but it is in fact spring time now....
 
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Pink Nighty said:
My shakes and tremors are the result of swinging flies one nov day on the NF Nooksack. I'm about halfway through the tail out of a beautiful run, where the V is accelerating, getting narrow and the edges are frothy.

I land my just in the frothy shit across the V from me, and before I can even start the swing I snag up. I give it a couple pulls and that snag starts screaming upstream. It's going so fast that the line being ripped upstream is singing as it cuts through the water. In a flash it's gone from 15° downstream of me to 45° upstream. Never having seen anything like it, I started chasing it upstream. Bad idea, that put a slack in the line and it popped off. Never saw it, but the way it moved was awe inspiring. If you know the NF nook, it is heavy ass water and this fish cut through it like a pond. My gut says 20# of chum, but could have been a big ass bull or a sturgeon or a submarine for the way it swam.

Theres also the enormous smallmouth I hunted in an urban pond last spring. I saw it half a dozen times, @Josh
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Don't be surprised if you see it this year. I caught one in the exact same spot two years in a row. She was a fatty. Had a scar on her gilplate.
 
There I was, standing shin-deep in the Russian River, just up from the confluence with the Kenai on my first fly fishing adventure in Alaska. I had gotten up at o-dark thirty and was on high alert for ursine fishing buddies (I had seen both black and brown bears in the river not far from where I was standing.) Despite this I was in heaven.

The date was near the end of the salmon run, and lots of fishers had parked themselves in one spot to take advantage of the migration. I was looking for trout, walking downstream, trying not to make anyone angry. Toward the end of my morning I hooked something LARGE - I assumed it was a salmon - and was wondering how I was going to land it without breaking my 6-Wt rod. I don't know exactly how big, but it definitely showed up on the radar! I was worried about landing it when the problem resolved itself. As I was backing toward the bank I fell on my ass and broke it off.

I had a somewhat similar experience on the D last fall, again trout fishing downstream of some salmon redds. I remember seeing the chinooks breaching (or maybe they were the rarely seen fresh water Deschutes dolphins) and thinking of Roy Scheider saying 'We're gonna need a bigger boat!'.

I hooked a monster chinook that was probably not long for this world, but it was still over 36" long and pretty hefty (chinook, after all). It was waaay too big for the trout net I had, and I was again fishing the 6-Wt. Once again fate favored me by breaking it off.
 
First, let me say I don't fish for steelhead; decided a couple decades ago to leave the remaining ones alone. Therefore, I have never caught a steelhead.

However. I was fishing a small S River trib, well upstream of a supposedly impassable falls. Targeting small creek trout with a glass 2wt and 5X tippet, I cast a termite pattern into a relatively large plunge pool, and as it drifted through, two large shadows rocketed up from the depths, and one of them snarfed it, then started tail walking and generally causing mayhem. While not huge - I'd guess 24" - I'm assuming it was a pair of overly ambitious steelhead that decided those falls were not, in fact, impassable.
I'm pretty sure I yelped. I managed to keep it on for a minute or so, but I didn't even have a net, given that I was expecting 8 inch fish. That poor little Cabelas CGR was bent almost double. I did get it within a foot of my hand before a head shake snapped it off.
Pretty sure that scene of the two fish racing for that termite in crystal clear water is permanently imprinted on my brain!
 
There are several that come to mind, but I'll share one that has stuck with me over the years.

This was an early summer, probably wild, Skamania fish circa June 1980-81. I was "hunting" pocket water when I spotted a couple holding in a slot next to a large boulder. Snuck up on the backside of the boulder, peeked over, and saw 3 steelhead. Two standard 8-10# fish, and a third that dwarfed the "smaller" fish. Easily a 20# class fish (and yes I know what one looks like).

My hands were shaking so bad I could barely pinch the shot needed to get the fly down in the turbulent pocket. Several drifts later the line stopped, I lifted, and the water exploded with a yard+ of fresh chrome airborne above my crouched position. It hit the water, bolted downstream at warp 9, knitted my line into several rocks scattered across the run before popping the leader. I was lucky to get my fly line back.

It was over in seconds, but can still see it backlit by the early summer sun. That one still stings.
 
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Had arrived in late afternoon at out of the way lake in the Norcal mtns east of Redding known to occasionally put out a monster brown. After setting up camp, with dusk arriving my wife decided to kick back with a beer while I launched my Woodsriver float tube, anxious to try out a newly wrapped 9' Loomis IM6 6 wt.
Had on a deep sink line and a big black leech, was slow kicking in about 30' of water when the rod suddenly just bent deep. Pulled hard, no response, figured I had snagged some wood, so started kicking and pumping the rod,
figuring to break the 10# Maxima tippet....when that 'log' suddenly started swimming off, and I could feel a deep pulsing through the rod. Over the next half hour nothing I did made a difference, whatever was down there would swim when it wanted, stop when it wanted, change direction when it wanted. Finally, with the dark coming on, said f'it and locked down the drag and pulled with everything I had, and was soon looking at a fully straightened hook.
My biggest caught Brown to hand, courtesy of Paulina Lake, put up a bulldog of a fight and was close to double digit if not right at it....and it didn't pull half as hard as whatever the hell I lost on that mtn lake.
 
Fishing from a boat in front of the main hotel in Los Barriles. We were fishing to some roosters and jacks and couldn't get them to look. The guide wanted to try a deeper presentation. My 8 wt was rigged with a deep sink line from a kayak outing the day before so I put down the 10 wt and started throwing the 8 and letting it sink. I hooked about a 25 pound rooster - the fish just screamed through the pack of other fish and annihilated my sinking fly - I had not even started stripping. It took off to the south - away from all the moored up boats. We followed for quite a ways. Then it did a uturn and headed for the boats. It wrapped be around a mooring line. I was sure I was SOL, but backed off a bit and eventually it swam back around. I couldn't believe my luck and started pulling hard again. The tippet snapped almost immediately. The change of emotions during the fight is probably why that is the one I think about the most.
 
I was on the back end of a 12-day dirtbag summertime trout trip with a friend. We were kind of sick of each other's shit but also still stoked on the fishing and spending our last days of the trip on the Missouri. We had borrowed a drift boat and were floating somewhere below Craig, I want to say it was between Mid Canon and Mountain Palace. Doing a lot of solid American nymphing with a big prince nymph tool fly and like an 18 or 20 very simple flashabou bodied midge that was a pattern that just got simpler and simpler with each late late night after a long float, but needing a few more of the hot pattern for the water we were on and what we were doing. Dropping off a deep riffle I hooked something that I couldn't move. We didn't anchor or pull over, it was just going downstream with us, bulldogging. I decided that I was going to either win this or lose it but I was going to do something, so I increased the pressure on the already significant bend and just broke that fish right the heck off. Maybe doesn't make for the best story but I suspect it would have been a trip maker. Of course, if it ended up not being what I think it was, I wouldn't have this indelible memory.
 
Billy said:
I thought this would be a fun thread. Tell your stories of the ones that got away. Those fish that leave you shaking and wanting just another chance to replay what went wrong. I'll start.

Yesterday I was on a mixed bag lake that I know grows the occasional big rainbow. It's a challenging lake with good depths and productive shallows and just has a mysterious feel to it's depths. Because it's got largemouth the rainbow density is low. It's not uncommon to have only a small handful of strikes.
View attachment 148113

I was throwing a big olive craw jig on a type five which has become my go to set up for lakes where I may catch bass, carp, walleye or whatever else as well as rainbow.
View attachment 148107

A solid hour went by with nothing. I was pondering fishing a sister lake which would require a short portage. I was out over deep water but drifting towards shallow. I made a long cast and started a slow strip and pause retrieve.

Just as I started working the fly up the incline and was nearing the end of the cast my day dream was interrupted by the type of strike that can steal your rod. No hook set was needed as I was fast into a big, pissed fish. This thing went from down deep to flying into the sky and I got my first glimpse of a rainbow that I would guess would top over 8 pounds.

Countless jumps and runs later and I started pondering how I was going to land such a fish. At one point the rainbow made a jump that almost put her in my lap. I was cursing myself for not replacing the net I had lost weeks ago. I would need to go ashore I thought to myself. I let up on pressure just a touch to kick towards the shallows.

She was gone. No line break. No hook break. Nothing. It just popped off delicately and I watched her swim down into the depths.

I had her at my feet and then just like that she was gone. The shaking of my hands remained for several minutes as I replayed the fight over and over in my mind. Smile on my face.

Your turn💔
Billy
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Not my turn to cry but my turn to share Billy's excitement. Yesterday morning I was heading down the highway when my phone rang, it's Billy. I answer and hear him going about a 100 mph telling me about this gynormous (my grandson's word) rainbow, the fish almost jumping into his float tube, jumping many times..... Young man was absolutely GIDDY (and it can be contagious!). I ended up hiking across scablands to watch him fish and be close enough to shoot the breeze which made me late in meeting up with @Starman77 . This was perhaps an hour after his GYNORMOUS trout and he was still rockin'! Well done Billy!!
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Good thread, Billy....it's been fun thinking of all the 'one's that got away' (y)

One of the more recent was up on the Blackfoot above Johnsrud maybe 5 years ago. It was a warm late July/early August day and I got a hall pass cuz the wife was heading in to town to go shopping with her sister.

The water was low and warm enough to cross back and forth if one picked their spot well. There was a fairly steady flow of floaters and fishing was kinda slow. I'd gotten a handful of 10-14 inchers and was about to call it when I came upon a 90 degree bend in the river.

The main current was river left and it did a bit of a hairpin to the right after hitting a rock wall...with a deep pocket under a rock shelf as it continued down stream. I figured there had to be something hanging out in the shade under the shelf so I started flinging whatever I thought might work.

I floated some hoppers and other dries....nada. I dead drifted some nymphs....nope. I swung a streamer or two...nuh uh. I took a break after a guy in a floating barco lounger went by and then I tied on a little minnow pattern that's done okay at Pass lake.

The current was kinda tough for me to get a good swing and as a last resort I decided to throw some downstream mends so the fly was 'swimming' down stream as it passed near the shelf.

I think it was the third cast and I thought I hooked a beaver. It was such a non-aggressive take yet I could feel the fish. I pictured it slowly heading down stream before it was gonna turn and resume it's place under the rock shelf. I gave it a little bit of tension while I shit myself trying to figure out how I was gonna play this.

I could feel the line thrumming and it was over in an instant. I don't really remember what I did, other than over react and break it off. Then I had to sit down for a bit cuz of the shakes. Ha!

Good memories, thanks for that.
 
I had a trip to the Lower Sacramento one time, I was fishing right above the Sundial Bridge, fishing some stonefly dry with a green copper john below it. The stonefly went under, I set the hook with my 5 WT, and the thing just screamed all the way across the river, took me in to my backing, and snapped me off. I never even had a chance to try to slow it down.

Another time on the Lower Trinity I was fishing this great steelhead run, and saw/heard a nice chinook roll in a pool below that. I was still figuring out how to spey cast, so imagine my surprise when I threw a good cast in to the pool and hooked up on the swing, first cast. The rod started to pulse and I yelled at my friend "BENJI! HOLY SHIT!!!"

SNAP! I must have had a wind knot or tied a shitty tippet knot. That was painful
 
Patti Perry. She was in the top 5 most beautiful girls in my high school. I was a shy long haired pheasant hunting, dirty jeaned, plaid wearing (way before it was cool, so it was definitely not) skinny kid with low self esteem. We hung out a bit but I had no idea she was really into me until it was too late. Last couple of days of school she told me she had really hoped I would ask her out. School ended and I was off to the coast deck handing on a salmon troller and she was back with her jock boyfriend. I've lost some nice one's over the years, but none like that.
 
Fish or ??

I’m young 12-13 or so. Late mid 70’s. New to fly fishing. I have a store bought kit fly combo from Ernst/PaynPak hardware store. I don’t cast well but I can get a fly out a bit and feed the line to get a decent fly drift going. (In a raft with my dad who’s rowing and not fishing). This is in deep southwest Oregon river outside a town named Chiloquin. Holy shit. 😮. If I remember correctly it was a fly called spruce or had spruce it its name. I swear my rod was gonna break. My dad said that thing is the size of a salmon. It was big. Got it near the raft but then ….. broke free. The feel of that fish on a fly rod was one reason I converted over. Before as a young kid I was using conventional gear. But that was fun!!! That fly rod Berkeley glass cherrywood kit gotta a lot of use the next few years.
 
I was up in Labrador at a lodge. I had taken a few Brook Trout in the 6–7-pound range. I hooked into a very very large fish and saw that it was much bigger than anything I had ever caught. After about 10 minutes on the hook, it came off. The fish straightened out a # 8 Prince Nymph. I almost cried!
 
A few years ago on a June day at a central WA lake known to grow decent fish of many species, including brown trout, I dropped my boat in at a rough launch. I let the breeze push me off shore while I set up my 5wt and type 5 sinking line with a simiseal leech. I flipped it out behind the boat and started feeding out line while I used the trolling motor to get back towards the shoal. I turned on my fish finder and watched as the contour showed the transition from 30, 25, 20, 18, ….and there’s the edge at 10’ with weeds. I swung the motor and gave it some power to make the turn. As my line made the turn parallel to the weeds, I felt a hard stop. I lifted my rod and felt deep head shakes. My whole fly line was out so grabbed a section of backing and started to pull in line. The fish rolled way back behind me, right on the weed line then did a toilet-flush tail slap and moved fast down the contour to deep water. In a few seconds, I felt the fish grinding it’s face on the bottom. I kept the line tight but after the second round of mashing, my fly popped out. Once I caught my breath and realized I had just lost a legit monster, I spun my boat around to tell a grandpa with his grandson back at the launch area what just happened. I fished the rest of the day but found mostly perch.
 
My second year of steelhead fishing. I had fallen in love with my Beulah Platinum 5117, it had proven itself as quite capable of landing our typical 4-8 pound summer run fish with no problem.

I walked to a known run about a mile from home. I had just started stepping down after reaching my casting distance when it ate.

It was a good eat, but I wanted to get a hook set in as it didn’t bolt. It pulled back a split second after I hit it. The rod blew 3-4” above the cork. The top of the rod ran down the line, I am left holding the butt.

It didn’t move away once tension was gone, in fact it came towards me a little. I decided not to mess around and try to land it. I grabbed my shooting line and started stripping in keeping it wrapped around one hand until I felt tension. As soon as I came tight it bolted and broke 10 lb Maxima almost instantly!

Edited to add I now always try to fish tippet that will break before my rod does.
 
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Ski trip planned but knee injury prevents me from skiing. So I'm the sag wagon dropping off the skiers then all I can do is some trout spey until I have to pick them up from the mountain. First world problems!!
 
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