October 13, 2023 - Uncharacteristically Large Fish

Having lived in Idaho, for the past 30 years, I’ve heard from various fisherman places to fish for large trout. A lot of the waters, like the Henry's Fork and South Fork, are waters that I don’t frequent very often due to their popularity and crowds. However, there is one river in my area that has a reputation for large trout, but it’s mainly fished in the autumn after the irrigation flows have diminished and the river flow is more manageable. It is much less known and mostly fished only by locals. I’ve never fished this river, but this year I decided I would go and give it a try.

I really didn’t know where to go, as there’s no specific landmarks that are published, so I scouted on Google maps and decided just to head up there and check it out - whether I caught any fish or not. Because of the size of the water, I decided to take with me the Suntech Sawanobori 53. I haven’t fished this rod for a long time, but I thought it would be a good match given that it’s the longest rod that I have and that it has a reputation of being able to handle large fish. I decided to mate this rod with a 14 foot knotted tapered fluorocarbon line.

The drive to the water was beautiful. I think one of the reasons why I haven’t visited this river before is because I didn’t know exactly where to go. But I found a route to the river that was very easy to follow and gave some scenic views of the area's volcanic remnants. 

This river is a classic East Idaho river. What I mean is that you can be driving along looking at wheat fields, and then all of a sudden there will be a steep walled canyon lined with lava formations with the river at the bottom. And so it was with this river.

I decided to get off the main road onto a two track and follow it down to the river. This required shifting into four-wheel-drive, and working my way through the sage brush flat and then down through the rhyolite canyon walls to the riverbank.

Upon arriving at the river, it wasn’t anything like I expected. The water level was actually pretty low and I was concerned that the flow would be too minimal for good fishing. I rigged up an Oxford Wool Kebari as a searching pattern, and begin to work the deeper water that I could find. It didn’t take too long before I hooked into my first fish, which was on the opposite side of the stream flow in an eddy. This turned out to be a beautiful rainbow of about 16 to 17 inches. The first thing that I noted about the fish was that it was very fat for its size. This made me think that this particular river must be very nutrient rich, and that the rumors of large fish were likely true. 

As I worked my way up stream, I caught more fish. The largest fish that I caught was a 21 inch wild rainbow that was very fat. It was shaped like a football and less like a trout! I would have liked to have recorded that fish, but unfortunately my camera was off! Bummer! However, I did catch other fish  that were in a similar length and weight range. They were uncharacteristically large for me, as I'm not a large trout angler.

I found the Sawanobori 53 worked very well, but I found that a 16 foot knotted, tapered fluorocarbon line worked better than the 14 foot, as it gave me more reach to cover more water. Also, a Giant Oxford Wool Kebari (size 8 in this case) worked better than the smaller version. The fish really hit that large kebari hard!

Here's the vlog of my outing: