Fishing the Yakima on 1/30/05. It was a good morning of nymphing; While we hadn't caught a lot of fish, the fish we saw and/or landed were beautiful, fat and just plain great bows.

I pulled into one of my favorite spots on the river. I have personally been fishing this particular spot and stretch of river long before we saw the traffic we do now on the mighty Yakima.

I had Brett fish upstream with a dry dropper and we picked of a nice fat healthy 19" hen. She was extremely hot and feisty while we battled her. On prime time spots like this, it is nice to rotate anglers into the "honey hole", so after Brett released the gorgeous bow, Brian stepped in and tossed the dry dropper.

The previous two days amongst our guide crew we had spotted a couple of adult Skwala stone flies. In all the years on the Yakima, this is the earliest confirmed adult Skwala sightings that I know of. While Brian fished the dry dropper we managed to briefly hook up on one with the dropper but was not able to wrestle the bow in.

I said to Brian, " Maybe we should switch back to a full nymph set up, It has been good for us today" he agreed and off we proceeded. Approximately the fifth cast after we switched back to the nymph rig, Brian and I were both stunned by what followed. Brian had placed a great cast in a very likely location, he then mended the line and as he mended the line the indicator (or bobber) floated right over a very prominent drop-off and what followed up from the bottom was a considerably larger fish than most have ever seen on the Yakima (I estimate the fish in the 23-24 inch class with incredible shoulders).

The story continues... The fish tracks the bobber for what seemed like an eternity but in reality about 5 feet and then to our complete amazement comes up and takes the big yellow bobber. Now to this point, this story is not unusually special as we may have all seen this happen a time or two before. But here's "the rest of the story".

Again, this fish is probably one of the top 15 fish I have personally ever seen on the system and I have over 4000 floats in my years on the water. The fish takes the indicator down and under the water and what any right minded angler would do instinctively at this point would be to set the hook, even though the indicator has no hook in it! This is exactly what Brian did, and in all the years I have fished I have never seen the likes of this one; The fished held on to the indicator while Brian set the hook and the result was (believe it or not) the fish took our indicator right off of the line and what we ended up with was a leader and our flies! (The type of indicator we were using was a Nymph Tracker...it has a pinch-on type clasp mechanism with a poly yarn floating portion). Oh my, I love my job!

Jack