Tailing Loops

I figure as a good way to start talking about my fishing experiences, I'll tell you about what was probably the most rewarding fish I caught all of last year. It wasn't the biggest fish, on the best day, or even in a new location. What made this fish rewarding was two things: one, it was the first fish that I caught on a fly that I had tied; and two, it was my first and only (to date) tiger trout.

I was fishing Mill Creek that day, as I'd heard rumors of guys catching some trout there despite the heat that had been keeping the trout in the Loyalhanna down deep and totally uninterested in eating. I was working downstream, only bothering to fish deeper pools and pocket water, as the shallow areas were too warm to be attractive to trout, but even at that, it was shaping up to be a typical day for a new fly fisherman: no runs, no hits, and about a million errors.

I was just choosing flies at random, tying a new one on whenever I lost the one before that up until that day. The evening before, however, I was talking to Rich in his fly shop, and he suggested sticking to ants, beetles, hoppers, and buggers for these hot summer days. So I bought a few of his ants and beetles along with a griffith's gnat that appealed to my fancy, and headed home to tie some buggers. By the time I put my boot in the water the next morning, I was armed with a box consisting of the flies I'd purchased from Rich and about 15 wooly buggers, in varying styles (all showing the sloppy roughness of a beginner tyer), in black, white, and olive.

By the time I got to my first really nice pool, I'd lost about a half dozen flies and was now tossing a modified olive wooly bugger with a front body made of a series of purplish glass beads. A friend and fellow fly fisherman named Mark had shown me this tie, and said that the guy who showed him claimed it imitated a baby trout. While that may be so, I wasnt sure if a hatchery fish would even connect the thought "baby trout" with the thought "food". Still, it was neat looking and easy to tie, so I did a few of them up that still managed to look like crap due to my being a beginner.

So I took my baby trout and tossed it to the tail of this pool, and as I stripped it back to me, around a submerged stump, a dark shape darted out, almost too fast to realize what it was, and disappeared again, with my fly! A good strong battle and a few tense, long, moments later, and I brought my first tiger to shore:
After posing for its photo shoot (just this one picture), this fish was released to fight another day.

For anyone curious, the Tiger Trout is a sterile hybrid of a male brook trout and a female brown trout. You can read more about them here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_trout
http://tigertroutfishing.com/
http://ezinearticles.com/?Fly-Fishing-For-the-Elusive-Tiger-Trout&id=1668954

Finally, that baby trout bugger: