Georgia Fly Fishing Blog

Posted By Kent Klewein on October 26, 2010

So it’s that time of year again, when serious brown trout bums start hunting for their next trophy brown to catch. The farther north you live in the states the sooner you should start hitting your favorite waters that support good brown trout populations. If you live north of NC and TN, October can be the best time to hit the prespawn and catch browns moving up to spawn. If you live south of this range you’ll probably want to be postponing your hunt until mid-November on.

Check out these photos from my good friend Ryan Dunne, with Bent Rod Media. He just got back from fishing a trout stream well north of us where he landed some really nice pre-spawn browns.

So where should you hunt pre-spawn browns? Concentrate on streams that have plenty of water. I’m talking about streams that have well over ten plus miles of quality trout water. The more water a fishery has the more numbers of pre-spawn browns and running fish you’ll find. Even better is to target a watershed that starts out as a small headwater stream and ends up as large river.

Ryan Dunne was targeting a trout stream that has twenty plus miles of water with very good numbers of wild browns and rainbow trout. His knowledge of the stream and perfect timing paid big dividends for him this past week. It’s also really important to target streams with good wild trout populations. This is because they have the proper instincts and know how to spawn effectively. Targeting trout streams with mostly stocked fish is the wrong approach. Although they will spawn, most of the time they lack the wild instincts to be effective spawners, and you won’t find really good runs of trout.

So you’ve found the right stream and have marked your calendar for your hunt, that’s priority one. Your second priority is to fish the right flies and rigs to be successful. I like to use two methods. If the stream I’m fishing isn’t conducive to sight fishing or the water is stained you’ll see me fishing a tandem nymph rig. My top fly will be something of significant size, like a woolly bugger, rubberleg stonefly, or girdle bug. My dropper nymph generally will be a attractor fly used to generate a reaction strike. My dropper nymphs usually consist of bright copper johns, egg patterns/san jaun worms, or something like a psycho prince or rainbow warrior. If you aren’t finding pre-spawn fish

On the otherhand, if I can sight fish for trout or if I find the tandem nymph rigs aren’t working I’ll try twitching a small streamer for the pre-spawn fish. Often you’ll find brown trout are really aggressive and can be taken by jigging, swinging, or stripping a streamer in front of their faces. Try streamers is white, yellow, and olive for this method of fishing. Keep in mind when tying that often you’ll find yourself fishing in very shallow and tight quarters for the pre-spawn browns and it will be much easier to present your fly with the appropriate weighted fly. That means you’ll need to tie up streamers in a variety of weights so you will be ready whatever conditions you encounter.

Hope these tips help during your hunt this fall for trophy brown trout. They’ve been very successful for me over the years. If you have any comments or recommendations that have worked for you in the past, please comment on this post for our readers.

Keep it Reel,

Categories: Fly Fishing
Tags: Bent Rod Media, Brown Trout, Fly Fishing for trophy Brown Trout, Hunting Fall Brown Trout, Kent Klewein, Reel Job Fishing, Ryan Dunne