Another good attractor pattern for brook trout from Phil Monahan and MidCurrent — the Hi-Vis Coachman. Almost every brookie I catch in small mountain streams is on a Royal Wulff. Sometimes I get crazy and use a Mr. Rapidan or increasingly some bastardized version of an Adams that I tie myself. If it looks buggy and the water is moving, throw something you can see easily because the fish are going to snag it if it’s drifting cleanly and you didn’t spook them.
This is a cool story about finding golden trout in Colorado from Orvis News. It’s not the puritanical native fish expedition, since golden trout are native to California and not Colorado, but the spirit of heading into the wild to search for uncertain populations of wild fish is similar to how I regard angling for brook trout on the east coast. This guy found a lode of golden trout. Good on him.
This gets me jazzed. I am really looking forward to pre-spawn brook trout fishing in the next couple months.