Thanks to all you Fly Talk readers who chimed in with guesses on what type of fish this is, where it was caught, and what it ate. To my surprise, many of you nailed the fish right away. It is indeed an arapaima. A good number of you also got the country right. We caught it in the jungle in Guyana, near the Rewa River. But nobody until the very end (and she is a ringer who no doubt heard me talking about this adventure on ESPN radio in Denver Saturday morning) got the fly pattern right.
The title of this post is a little misleading. While in theory these little guys are in a bucket, what you're actually seeing here is 20,000 freshly hatched cut bow trout (a hybrid between a cutthroat and a rainbow) in what's called an egg jar.
Most of you who follow FlyTalk might realize by now that Romano and I are both shameless streamer junkies. We'll pound the banks from a boat, trying to turn big fish with blind casts, but we also like to wade and sight-fish streamers in low, clear water. Big flies catch big fish, to be sure. Yet in clear water, you have to make the right presentation for streamers to work well. While I've learned many valuable tips from streamer gurus like Kelly Galloup, who said, "You have to dictate the action, and not wait for something to happen," the greatest streamer lesson I ever learned didn't happen on a trout river, and it didn't even involve a true streamer fly.
Here's another sweet little bug from our friends at flyrecipes.com. It's called the Banksia Bug (formerly known as the Patchouli Pupa) and was created by my friend and warm water fly fishing guru Jay Zimmerman.
"I began tying this fly to imitate the masses of free-living caddis larva in all my home waters here in Colorado and elsewhere in trout streams all over the West.
This is a photo of my friend Russ Miller torturing himself with a 9-weight rod and full sinking line on Lake Granby last night. He was casting a double bunny fly that looked like a dead squirrel, so we decided to call it Bernie's Bunny.
Take a close look at this photo Tim Romano took of Oliver White battling a small tarpon. You'll notice something is missing... the reel. That's because there isn't one.
We just came back from a gonzo jungle expedition (in a place I'll tell you about later) where we literally caught hundreds of trout- to salmon-sized tarpon every day. So to make things even more interesting, we decided to catch some on a Tenkara rod (Yamame). We landed over 50 tarpon on Tenkara, the largest weighed about eight pounds.
Over the last nine months, I've been shooting a little underwater book project with my friend Geoff Mueller. We've seen and done some very interesting stuff, like hanging out with a NOAA biologist in Washington state, drift diving the Green River in Utah and visiting a state run hatchery here in Colorado to learn all about the life stages of trout.
The rules for this contest are simple: Tell us what kind of fish this is, where we caught it and what the fly this fish is chewing on looks like. Yes, this fish ate a fly.
You know I love to share some weirdness on Fly Talk every once in a while that has nothing to do with fly fishing. This is one of those times. You're either gonna love me or be a little grossed out with this one.
Despite what it says on its Flyrecipes.com page, I'm pretty sure that this week's Tie Talk bug, The Dirty Rat, is not by Jackie Treehorn. Don't get me wrong, I love the character reference to one of my favorite movies of all time, as well the pattern itself. It IS damn dirty…