Fishing guides idle flies to tackle lunker trout

Bored with the slow fly fishing at Hayden Lake on April 2, two Orvis Northwest Outfitters guides switched to trolling gear and sat back in their boat to relax.

And then all hell broke loose.

“The water temperatures were just too cold and not conducive to fly fishing for smallmouth and crappie,” said Pat Way. “So we went back and got a planer board, threw in a six-pack and went out to troll for a while.”

One rod was rigged with heavy line and a big jointed plug – the kind of tackle you’d expect to use in a lake known for big fish, including northern pike.

But it was Bryan Duncan’s ultra-light rod rigged with 6-pound test line that bent over like a palm tree in a hurricane.

The 5-inch blue-and-white Rapala had lured a strike from what Idaho Fish and Game officials believe is the biggest rainbow trout ever hooked in Hayden Lake.

“When we left the dock we looked at my landing net and said, ‘Nah,’ ” Way recalled. “You can shake off little fish and pike are easy to grab behind the head.”

The “relaxing” fishing session was anything but that. They had already had a few warm-ups by hooking two trout in the 12-pound range and another running 3 pounds, all of which had to be released, of course, since the catch-and-keep season for rainbows doesn’t open until April 29.

Then the big one hit near Clark Point and ripped out most of Duncan’s line. The fish carried on for a good 20 minutes even though the water temperature was a chilling 43 degrees.

“If the water had been 50 degrees, I don’t think I could have got it in,” Duncan said.

Substituting all four hands instead of a net, the two guides landed the fish and measured it at 34 inches long before releasing it back into the lake.

“I steelhead fish a lot, and this fish was a lot thicker bodied,” Duncan said. “It was a hen, full of eggs. Too bad we didn’t have a scale, but it was at least 24 pounds.”

Ned Horner, Idaho Fish and Game Department regional fisheries manager, said the fish could be a survivor from the Gerrard-strain Kamloops rainbows released in Hayden only in 1983 and 1984. The still-reigning world record 37-pound rainbow caught in Lake Pend Oreille in 1947 was a Gerrard Kamloops.

But Way and Duncan are remaining humble about their big catch on Hayden.

“I know guys who spend hundreds of hours on that lake to catch a couple of those fish in a season,” he said. “To get three big rainbows in one day – I mean we’re talking about a couple of fly fishing dorks who don’t troll much at all – it’s really just humorous.”