A Mid-Summer Night's Dream

On The Dark Side of Brown Trout Fishing
By Mike Robertson , Canadian Field Editor

I love to fish for massive browns. It’s the primary variety of trout I like to target. Why? Because they are the hardest to catch and they are, in my experience, the smartest of all trout. By day, they are extremely wary. Their eyesight is unsurpassed, among trout. I tell you, there’s no greater satisfaction than landing a really big one.

When the sun goes down and most people go to bed, that’s when I want to be on the water. It’s the perfect time to go after a truly massive brown trout. It’s when the river takes on a different kind of life. The rush of water is louder (because you have to listen to it to tell where you are). Of the many night sounds, the one you tune into is that of the rise and sometimes splash of an actively feeding trout. You can tell when they’re chasing minnows. It’s a clumsy way of fishing, at best, but there’s no greater excitement than the anticipation of what you might catch.

Browns are nocturnal by nature. Larger browns feed when the sun goes down and continue feeding all night long. Once your nerves settle and the edginess subsides, you concentrate on the task at hand—casting to large brown trout by moonlight and sometimes in pitch black. But in the last case, you’d better know your water.

Studies over the last 15 years have shown what some fishermen have long known. Trophy class browns feed at night. Biologists radio-tracking 20-inch plus browns found they spent most of their daylight time in cover. Types of cover were log jams, under-cut banks and river rocks large enough to hide them. But after sunset, these same trout became active predators on the prowl.

Research has shown that hungry browns after dark will sometimes cruise for miles, picking up crawfish, nymphs, minnows, small suckers and the fry of game fish, including their own. They’ll even take mice off the surface because basically they’ll eat anything they can wrap their lips around.

So as summer approaches faintly on the late winter horizon, I anticipate a mid-summer night’s dream: catching a large brown at night.

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