Originally Posted by
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Not just brookies but also browns, rainbows, cutthroats, lakers, golden etc... Maybe it is because I grew up in CO, but for me trout is where it is at and I've caught some good ones.
My biggest brookie was 19 inches long and weighed just over 3 lbs. My biggest lake trout is 29 lbs. My biggest brown is 9 lbs 10 oz. My biggest rainbow is about 8 lbs. I've caught a lot of cutts over 6 lbs with maybe 2 or 3 that would top 8. Never caught a big golden (and I'm talking about the actual golden trout from the west coast and not those fake yellow rainbows in the east) but they are the prettiest of all trout. A friend of mine caught a 16 lb splake once and that was a really cool fish and we catch a lot of rainbow/cutthroat hybrids up to 5 or 6 lbs.
I don't use bait for trout. I use either spinners, jigs or flies and I don't fish anyplace for trout that depends on stocking. Where I fish is all natural spawning. Give me wild trout in a clear mountain stream any day of the week.
yeah, our fishing is much more limited than that, anything here that holds brookies wont hold anything else. typically very small mountain runs. i would love to pull out a 19 incher lol!!
colorado sounds like the mecca, cutthroats and all that, you should take me on an elk hunt lol
yeah all of our "golden" trout are stocked and people talk about them like theyre this super rare awesome fish when in all honesty its because they dont stock that many. however most that ive seen are big so they must only release bigger holdovers. we have native browns everywhere though. you should try live crawdads i swear to you its literally a magnet, you know those deep pools? drop him in the bottom and he'll crawl all over the rocks. fishing with lures is more fun but the crawdads are deadly productive if you wanna fill the freezer.