There are no brown trout here.

Fish aren’t going to rise unless bugs are hatching.

Nothing in this pond is over a few pounds.

You can’t use flies – they’ll only take bait.

Oh yeah?

For an unpredictable pursuit like fly fishing, those statements sound awfully concrete. Add in a little bit of competitiveness and a dash of skepticism and you’re basically issuing a challenge. How can anyone really know those things? Is it that those statements are empirical facts, or are the majority of people content with the boring bulk of the bell curve?

Could a little bit of exploration and effort (and some remarkable happenstance) yield some interesting results?

For example, the brown trout pictured at the head of this article wasn’t supposed to be where it was. Fishing a  river for the first time, I caught it after only two or three casts. For the rest of the day I only caught rainbows. Trout after trout: rainbows. I chalked it up to the way the cards fell.

Apparently that first fish was a hallucination.

I had an angler who lived on the stream tell me I was wrong. There was no convincing him that the fish had found its way to this section of river. But it was true. I pointed to the pool. I showed him the picture. He was unconvinced. He was also a little indignant. It wasn’t like I said I had caught a bottlenose dolphin, though. It was a trout. Just a change of pace from the rainbows and brookies he was used to.

And let’s be real. The state could have stocked it. A private entity could have stocked it. It could have swam from who knows where. This angler might have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time for years and years, catching hundreds of trout but not this trout. Maybe I caught the only brown trout in the whole river that made it there as an egg on the leg feathers of a heron. Maybe I am working too hard to justify someone’s indignation.

The moral of the story is to try. And another moral is to expect the unexpected in nature. This two-pronged moral is what makes fishing so exciting. You don’t know what you’re going to see and what circumstances are going to lead to you seeing it. I’ve caught fish on dries when nothing is hatching. I’ve caught big fish in small ponds. I’ve caught fish on flies when even the powerbait crowd is getting skunked.

The kicker is that I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with me being an expert angler. I think that I’ve just cracked a few codes every now and again. I know that I’ve been the beneficiary of being in the right place at the right time. I’ve been known to accept a challenge. Most of all, exploration and throwing convention to the wind count for something.  That, and like a lot of fly fishers out there, I’m always willing to try.