One good catch can turn sob story to fish tale

Such fish don’t have to be of record size, but it doesn’t hurt when the fish can be classified as big.

When our full-time jobs took us to Ely earlier this week, my co-workers and I opted to spend an evening fishing at nearby Comins Lake. Thanks to folks who did freelance fish plants with northern pike, this onetime trophy trout fishery is nothing like it used to be.

Long gone are the days when catching 20-inch rainbows or brown trout was commonplace. Anglers still are catching trout, but they have been few and not of the smaller variety because the pike have eaten them all. However, once in a while I hear about a trout that tips the scale at 5 pounds or more.

But I wasn’t looking for trout. I wanted to do something I never had done before, and that was to catch a pike on my fly rod. This also was the chance to test drive the inflatable pontoon boat I bought last spring but had yet to let out of the box.

Despite a dry run Sunday, assembling the pontoon took longer than I had anticipated. By the time I got on the water, only about an hour of fishing light remained, at least as far as legal boating hours go.

Soon I realized there was more to fishing from a pontoon boat than meets the eye.

I had left my fins at the truck, so my only means of propulsion was the pair of oars that came with the boat. The oars worked great as long as I just wanted to cover lots of water. But when I needed to fine-tune my position, they just got in the way. At one point, I wrapped my fly line around both oars and one of my hands. That happened while trying to retrieve a fly that was caught in the weeds.

As the sun set behind Ward Mountain, I dejectedly rowed back to the shore. Despite my best efforts, I had caught no fish.

The pike I sought had eluded me, but as I pulled the pontoon up on shore, I thought about the Laserlure in my bass box. It’s the one I picked up at ICAST and wrote about a couple of weeks back. People laughed at me then and thought it was a joke. My co-workers onshore did the same thing when I told them I was going to try it out.

The red light in the lure lit up as soon as it hit the water and was easy to see in the dark. On my sixth cast, something hammered the lure. The fight was on, and the fish peeled line from the spool on my reel. I was sure the fish was a pike and hollered at friend Martin Olson for help. The fish felt big, and I knew a net would come in handy.

When Martin netted the fish, I couldn’t believe what I saw. It wasn’t a pike in the net but a rainbow trout — a large rainbow trout. He measured in at about 24 inches long. I don’t know exactly because the fish extended well beyond the 18-inch ruler. Martin and I guessed the fish weighed 5 pounds or more.

It was the largest trout I’ve ever caught.

We were excited and went back to fishing as quickly as we could. Olson tossed a Super Duper and began reeling in the lure. After a few turns of the reel handle, a fish smacked the Super Duper and began stripping Olson’s reel. When I turned at the commotion, I saw Olson’s rod doubled over and heard the drag on the reel as the fish fought against the lure.

After several minutes I netted the fish. It was another huge rainbow — bigger than the one I had just released.

My hands, which are not small, could not reach around the fish’s girth. He was long and thick and probably weighed close to 6 pounds. We were pretty excited.

We cast a few more times and caught nothing more, but our spirits remained high. Sure, it would have been nice to catch another big rainbow or even the pike I had hoped to catch when we started fishing. Somehow that didn’t matter.

We each had caught and released a beautiful rainbow. And though we each caught only a single fish, they were the big fish that longtime stories are made of. I can’t wait to see how big they grow as the years go by and the stories are told.

Sometimes one fish can make all the difference.

Doug Nielsen is an award-winning freelance writer and a conservation educator for the Nevada Department of Wildlife. His column is published Thursday. He can be reached at doug@takinitoutside.com.