Thanks for the responses. I've already worked my way through pretty much everything mentioned, though. Here were the results:

BruisedSausage's heavy (deep-water) spinner is what I caught the one fish on, and it's what has attracted the chaser and the short strikes. If I fish straight upstream, I can't reel in fast enough to keep the line taut, and it usually ends up snagged in the rocks on the bottom downstream from me when I finally do catch up with it and get the line tight. Like I think you described, I've been casting to the edges of the fast water, slightly up and across, and letting the current swing it to the edges like a streamer. This is the only thing that has worked, but I'm hanging up all of the time on the bottom when I do get low enough.

Fezzant and Hengst, I think that the water is faster, and the stream is more featureless than you're imagining it: the only "eddies" to speak of are the inside bends of the river where gravel/rock bars have formed, but the downstream side tends to be very shallow and featureless. The shorelines have been scoured away, so overhanging trees are rare, and tend to be wide-spread branches from 15-20' away from the banks. The water is almost crystal clear (it has an aquamarine tint), and there are eagles, hawks, and various fish-eating birds all about, so shallow water=quick death for trout.

I started out fishing like what you described, but I simply could not get a streamer deep enough with the gear that I have. Casting upstream far enough would require about 50 yard casts (or more) in most places. If I had a sinking line, I'd be using it, but like I said in the original post: I didn't bring one with me. I've been experimenting to build a streamer heavy enough to sink: I placed 5 - 1/8" tungsten beads on a #4 4X streamer hook, using the beads for the body, and I tied some sparse fox hair on the bottom and squirrel hair on top, with the hook riding point up. It looked pretty decent, weighed a ton, and it had very little resistance to water when wet--it was also impossible to cast with my 8-wt., so I used it with a spinning rod. Without more weight, the drag on my ultra-thin 4 lb. fluoro was enough to keep it from sinking. If I added about 2-3 BB shot in front of it, it would make it to the bottom after about 8-10' of drift, which was great, but the current at the bottom is so slow that it would immediatley hang up on the rocks. The first day I was using it, I sometimes thought I had a bite or two--it might have been snags--but I eventually snagged on the rocks and lost it.

Ontario Honker, your method of swinging is the only way that I think I can use a fly rod on this stream and present a fly in front of the trout, but the clear water and the wildness of the trout makes me think that I might be frightening them before I ever get a fly in front of them. I have to use a depth charge sink tip (500+ gr., I think?) and a short leader (a long leader drags, otherwise, and pulls the streamer up) with a heavily weighted slim profile streamer, like a sparsely tied woolly bugger or a foxtail or squirrel tail clouser. I haven't got any bites yet.

One major problem is the width of the stream and where to stand. If I throw to the banks, a heavy streamer hangs up in the shallows, or it doesn't get deep enough when the belly of the line pulls it into the main channel. I've been standing barely in the stream because I can't go more than 18" deep or the water carries me away, plus at 18", the upstream side of my hip waders has a pillow of water that goes up another 8-12", to the top of my hip waders. It's almost impossible to do anything on the far bank--going across the current--so I've been keeping the fly line in the shallows on my side of the main current, making the streamer land just barely into the main current, then letting the line and streamer swing as slowly as possible (feeding line and mending). It SHOULD work, but it hasn't yet. I'd like to try it more on a cloudy day, but it's been mostly bright when I've been out, and I think they're afraid of the shallow water. I've seen the pictures, so I know that there are enormous trout in this stream (some are >6 lb.), but I think that they pretty much stay camped out among the rocks at the bottom of the stream in the main channel and wait for the current to drop their food on their head.

This weekend I'm going to try the swinging technique some more, but I've thought of one more method that might work. Since the two main large food items that I've seen are adult hellgramites (dobsonflies) and adult stoneflies, and since both hellgramites and stonefly nymphs curl up in balls when carried away by the current, I've tied up some super heavy imitations. I took some size 12 wide-gaped curved hooks and loaded them up with 2 layers of .30 lead wire, then added some black crystal chenille and long coq de leon hackle, so that it looks like a curved black woolly worm but has little water resistance, plus a little iridescent green flash to grab their attention. I don't think I'll be able to fish these in the main channel with the fly rod because of the problems described above, but I think that a pair of them under an indicator could be cast downstream with a spinning rod, then control drifted by letting out line to keep the indicator taut (where the current is fastest) and see what happens to the nymphs down below. I'd bet that most of their food washes over them like that, and they tuck in behind the big rocks at the bottom and wait for it to fall on their heads.

Ontario Honker, I really haven't tried small flies because of the logistics of getting them down deep enough, but I guess that I may as well add a pheasant tail and/or a little BH prince to a deep nymph, just to see what happens.

It has been frustrating to fish the Chilik because of it's currents, but I only make it out on weekends, so I have all week to think up new approaches and/or scout out new stretches of water on topo maps and Google's satellite images, so by this time of the week I have re-convinced myself that I'm on the verge of hauling in limitless numbers of trophy trout. The first trip yielded nothing but frustration with the currents; the second trip provided hope with a pan-sized trout chasing my spinner; and last weekend felt like a major victory with a 6" fish in hand. By the way, the one I caught was the most bleached out rainbow trout that I've ever seen, almost devoid of color with a grayish-silver back and diamonds on its sides, and a white belly.

As far as regulations ... it's complicated. This is former Soviet Union, so everything is legal and nothing is legal, depending on who you are and who's checking. As near as I can tell, it's pretty much legal to use anything where I'm fishing, but pride has kept me from trying live bait thus far, but I'm definitely not above trying it, eventually.

As far as catch & release, it depends. The fisheries biologists are pretty much unanimous that the rainbows are over-populated, so I'd probably keep any pan-sized fish I caught (partly to convince my wife that I'm not Don Quixote chasing windmills). I would probably release anything small (of course) and probably anything big. The little 6" guy tore up his upper lip pretty bad: living in that current, he fought like he was possessed.

If you'd like to see what the river looks like, do a Google images search for "Chilik River," and you'll get a pretty good idea of what it's like, especially the rafting pictures.

By the way, I haven't been on this website very long, so maybe this is a dumb question: Is there a way to post pictures where you guys could see what the stream looks like? I'd put in links to other sites, but it seems F&S has some sort of spam-blocker that blocks my posts when I try that.

BruisedSausage, you may think I'm kidding when I say this, but it's true: the pictures I linked would be considered the MOST fishy. I didn't show the canyon shots, which are pretty much all whitewater, or the abraded stream rivulets running between islands of sand and rock. The bedrock doesn't stand up to the abrasions. This is a heavily glaciated area, so the rocks have been ground up into the sizes shown in the picture, and I've explored--at least as much as possible in three days of fishing for about 5+ hours each day--three distinct levels of the river, totalling more than 100 miles of streambed. We (I have fishing buddies, here) started out below the lower canyon at the top of the foothills, but it was whitewater gushing out of a canyon like the bottom of a waterslide. We traveled up the first mountain pass to the next level plateau, where a dam and reservoir are located just above the canyon: the lake holds lots of large trout, and it was at the mouth of the river emptying into the lake that I had a trout follow, but never take. The problem is that just above the lake is another canyon, once again flushing the water down in a whitewater plume. After hours and hours of going over topo maps, Google maps (especially the satellite view, which helpfully displays the whitewater from above), and internet research, I decided that the upper plateau--above the canyon above the lake (Bartogay Reservoir, if you want to look it up)--looked like the most gently sloping terrain, so I travelled there last weekend. The terrain is much more level, but the water has a mind of its own. The river has eaten a canyon into the plateau as it moves down, creating an ever deepening gorge at pretty much the same rate of descent as the rest of the river.

If you can imagine mountains made of glaciated gravel and stones slightly smaller than volleyballs, and if you can imagine a firehose of a stream steadily tearing away at it in a more or less straight line, you can imagine the Chilik River valley. The runoff from rains is massive, which clears away the near banks and pushes even more eroded rock and gravel to the sides and down, and chips aways at whatever is holding it up. The only exposed bedrock that I've seen is in the canyons, and that would be like fishing a whitewater ride at an amusement park, except that I don't have a raft.

I have been setting up to fish on the inside bends of the corners--there are a lot of corners/bends--which usually means standing on the tail of a gravel/rock bar. I can't cast across the current, though, because the thalweg (main current flow) is just too intense to allow any sort of drifts or mends. The only conceivable place for the trout to dwell is at the bottom of the main channel, which (I'm guessing/estimating) is probably strewn with volleyball to basketball sized round stones, which would provide excellent hides where food would fall in from above. Every local that I've seen uses 20' poles to tumble heavily weighted live bait over the areas where the gravel bars drop away after the bend has been rounded, and that would pretty much simulate what probably happens to dislodged nymphs and hellgramites being swept downstream.

I've never fished anything like it, but it's been very interesting and educational. I got a tip from a student's driver about a small stream trout fishery west of where I live (possibly with native eastern-run Asiatic brown trout), so I might check that out this weekend, but I want to take one more crack at the Chilik before I leave for the summer.

One last note of interest ... there is one stream that feeds into the Chilik at the uppermost elevations that is loaded with trophy rainbow trout, including three lakes, and two of which have monster trout swimming along the edges where they can be seen. The only problem is that the lakes and the stream (Kol-Sai Lakes and Kol-Sai River) are a national park, and fishing is (more or less) prohibited (though you can find plenty of pictures online of people fishing there). If I do catch-and-release, is it wrong, or does "When in Rome ..." have merit? Here's a fairly standard description of a guided trip to the area: www.kondor-tour.kz/kolsai_en Notice they mention that the lakes are "teeming with trout," yet they fail to mention that it's illegal to fish there. It's a beautiful place.

If anybody wants coordinates to look at the Google maps satellite images, let me know and I'll pull them up.