Fishing Creek, PA (07/11/2013)

The past few weeks have been filled with excessive rainfall and it has kept me busy observing all of the flow levels on the USGS database.  Most days you could still fish but the conditions were not optimal by any stretch of the imagination.  When I've gone out to Spring Creek we have had a lot of fish but nothing gigantic like Jeff hooked into on Thursday.

Due to the precipitation that we received in Central PA on Wednesday night I checked some of the stream gauges and decided that we would take a gamble and check out Fishing Creek.  The numbers were not insane but the fish we hooked into were healthy to say the least.  The first fish of the day was a nice brown trout and then we worked further up the stream and I heard Jeff say "I don't even know what to do with this trout."  Knowing him and our fishing conversations, I knew it had to be a hefty trout because I've never heard him say that when he hooked up with a fish.

After making my way downstream to him, I caught a glimpse of this trout's body and knew this was potentially the fish of the summer.  He was using 4x tippet so he was nervous to apply a significant amount of pressure onto the fish, so he let it make a few runs and applied minimal side pressure until we got his head out of the water.  Once Jeff got its head out of the water, I knew the Nomad hand net was about to be engulfed by this huge brown trout.

I was glad to be a part of this big brown as I netted it for Jeff but the conversations that were had about this fish kept us busy for the remainder of the day and into the night.  We reminisced stories about the fish like it was Bill Brasky from Saturday Night Live.

Enjoy a few of the pictures of this toad of a brown trout! Special shout out to my dad Greg Hoover for capturing these photos, he was clicking that camera like Marty Stouffer.

Jeff and his big brown trout

Nomad net saves the day again!