From this past weekend. Only fished for about ten minutes. Then the sky opened up and rained like crazy. Wouldn’t you know it, I forgot my rain gear at home.
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Wow Peder!!! That rainbow is huge! Did you get a measurement on it? It’s so big that the rainbow will not fit into the tamo net. Amazing catch.
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Thanks @Kookagee. I don’t know about huge, but it was certainly big compared to what is usual around my area. No exact measurements, but best guess is around 14" (35cm).
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I’ve caught grayling and golden trout before in lakes, but one of my goals this year was to catch both in streams. Caught the grayling yesterday in Utah and the golden trout last week in Wyoming.
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Cool I did not know there are Golden Trout in Wyo. For some reason I thought they are only found in Calif.
Here we have Golden Rainbow Trout. But they are not natural fish. They only come from hatcheries. Descended from a color mutation noticed on a fry in an in-state hatchery in , I think, the 1950s. Probably much the same as a website I saw last week that claimed everyone in the world with blue eyes, is related, all descended from the same person that just by chance had that eye color mutation in their DNA. Thousands of years ago.
@dwalker Yep, lots of golden trout waters in the Wind River Range in Wyoming. They’re also in Washington, Idaho, Utah, Montana, Colorado, etc.
I know some waters here in Idaho that get planted with the golden rainbow trout you’re talking about (I believe they’re called palomino trout here). Haven’t caught one, but they’d be an interesting species to target.
I think a lot of people use the name Palomino Rainbow trout and Golden Rainbow trout interchangeably.
But while they are basically from the same color mutation, they are different.
Palominos are a duller paler yellow color. The Goldens are a more intense gold color.
The female fish they descended from was spotted in the Petersburg, WV fish hatchery in 1954/55. It may have changed by now, but for many years only the WV hatcheries had success breeding Golden Rainbows with the intense gold color. Hatcheries in other states were not successful breeding them with the same rich gold color. Only producing paler yellow fish. It may be the WV hatcheries never shared fish with other state hatcheries that were closer descendants of the first fish they found with the color mutation. After all, there was probably money to be made from out of state anglers coming into WV to catch the bright gold colored trout.
https://anchorfly.com/trout-species/#golden-palomino
Since they are hatchery fish I think they may be fairly easy to catch when first stocked. But if they survive for a while they become difficult to catch. I think probably because they are easy to see in the water. Every angler throws their lure, fly, bait at them, and they become pretty leery of biting onto most things thrown their way.
I’ve hooked and lost them 4 or five times. I still recall the first time. I think it was the second summer I was tenkara fishing. Fishing on the Williams River. I saw a water fall about five feet high and tossed a fly onto one of the shelves of the water fall. Golden Rainbow fish on, but I soon lost it. I fished farther up river for an hour or so, but working my way back toward my car I tried the same water fall again. Same result, fish on, fish lost. Except this time after losing the second trout I looked back at the water fall, and for a few seconds I saw another Golden Rainbow trout looking at me that had come out from hiding behind the white water.
They are pretty fish, kind of a novelty. Their color not the best for survival. Perhaps more of an entirely synthetic fish than other rainbows. Same with the Tiger trout. Mostly I prefer to try to catch wild fish.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7717307-an-entirely-synthetic-fish
Years ago, on our first road trip made to Colorado to visit my wife’s brother in Denver, I visited every trout hatchery I could along the way. One of the Colorado hatcheries had an end run at the end of the raceways that held gigantic (10 Lbs and bigger) pure white to very pale goldfish colored trout, which I questioned a fisheries attendant about. He told me that those were the Hatcheries Manager’s special pets and were not stocked for the public to catch. They bought all their rainbow trout eggs from California, and in every batch of eggs there was a small percentage of hatchlings that came out as the light colored albinos, which the hatchery manager had them separate out and raise separately as they would be quickly eaten if they were placed in with fish big enough to eat them.
There are “Golden Trout” in some Eastern States that are very popular to fish for and considered to be Trophy fish, but they are a specially bread pale phase of rainbow trout and not genetically true golden trout. If golden trout live at elevations below about 8,000 feet, they loose their bright coloration and are practically impossible to distinguish from rainbow trout, of which they are more or less a subspecies, since they originally evolved from West Slope sea going rainbow trout stock that were isolated by geologic changes in streams with copper colored under laying rock formations at high altitude, where the females choose to breed only with the most brightly colored males.
To add to the confusion and complicate matters even more, golden trout are able to cross breed with both rainbow and cutthroat trout, cutt-bows and rainbow golden trout hybrids as well, so there is a tremendous amount of variation in color and in markings where these different fish live in the same water. Generally speaking, stream fish are the most brightly colored, with the males almost universally being far brighter in color than the females are.
In my experience, stream dwelling golden trout are no harder to catch than your stream dwelling rainbow trout. It is in the high lakes where the golden trout’s reputation for being nearly impossible to catch has been developed, and not with out just cause. But this is not because of any inherent characteristics of the fish themselves, but due to the nature of the impoverished environments where they live. Where, often the most abundant food organism they have to feed on is plankton. Probably, more specifically, bright red colored Copepod, too small to imitate individually but numerous enough to give the gin-clear water a slight red coloration. The golden trout slowly swim through the red clouds, mouth agape, filtering out the pin head sized bundles of protein with out paying any attention to anything and everything that you May throw at them. Gary LaFontaine had some limited success with Roll-Over Scud patterns, counted down to the proper depth on sinking lines and given the right twitch, at just the right time, right in front of the fish’s face, but all of that is not very tenkara friendly.
With Tenkara tackle, I have done best waiting for the afternoon thermal winds to come up, fishing from the windward shore (casting into the wind with a floating Tenkara line and a tapered leader to get drag free drifts) throwing ant, beetle and hopper patterns for the shore line cruising golden trout to take. Other than that, Chironomid pupa patterns have also been productive, as well as soft hackle type attractor patterns, and wooly bugger type pattern variations, with Fl- pink, orange and red tag Hot-Spots. Gold is where you can find it, and golden trout found and caught are one of the best treasures of all…Karl.
" Rainbow trout in hatcheries are susceptible to color variations, and about 1 in every 200,000 comes out blue. Wisner ( director of the Bureau of Hatcheries for the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission ) said there would be no novelty angling advantage to intentionally producing a blue trout…"
https://wvdnr.wordpress.com/2020/03/19/rainbow-vs-golden-rainbow-trout/
David, thank you very much for researching the Virginia Golden Trout and making that information available to us; I, for one, really enjoyed reading about how these golden rainbows evolved and were bred and developed. The information also gives some insight on how and why the Color Technology Principles work so well in the catching of fish. Thanks, much again…Karl.
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Wow, what beautiful fish, Tristan. The golden trout is amazing.
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Warning - long winded reminiscing post…
There is a local year-round, spring-fed, fly fishing/C&R only lake with public access that is located on private property. The property owner is/was a retired merchant marine sailor who had a fly fishing lodge there. The owner is/was a wonderful guy, a gracious host, full of fascinating stories of his career in the merchant marine, and an awesome chef. With the help of a local club, and donations from anglers he would plant the lake with 3 to 5 lb rainbows, and in the fall would bring in trout fingerlings for the big fish to snack on. My wife and I were having breakfast there one morning and watched an adult bald eagle swoop down on a fish that was too big for it to fly with so it had to “dog paddle” with its wings to a log where it could “haul out” to eat the fish.
We went there the first time for my birthday. The owner set up a table for my wife to do quilting while I fished. After that we went there for anniversaries and family birthdays for 3 years. But every time we were there we were the only guests at the lodge. Those were the days… he finally was forced to close by the IRS revoking his business tax status because his income from the lodge wasn’t enough to offset his business expenses. 
Anyway it could be a tough lake to fish successfully. Chironomid patterns work well, but not my favorite way to fish. But the lake was populated with red Daphnia,
and in early summer around my wife’s and son’s birthdays when they “hatched” - bloomed the fish wouldn’t take anything else but were kept well fed. It was “rumored” that a red Griffith’s Gnat fished in the film might work.
I miss that place so much.
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I caught my first fish from my new to me float tube using a Tenkara rod a week ago Saturday (no phone in the float tube for pictures) in a lake at a private sportsman’s club. This past Sunday my wife bought me a new kayak and I caught my first ever fish from a kayak using a Tenkara rod that evening.
Girdle bugs are really effective in Kentucky this time of year and that’s what’s hanging out of this guys mouth. The abomination in the rod pick is a squirminator that I tied on when the fishing started to fall off just before last light.
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I had a good day on a small suburban stream 20 minutes from home late last week before the smoke from nearby wildfires made it extremely unhealthy to be outside. The creek sees a fair amount of people playing in the water but not so much from anglers. It was a personal best numbers day for this creek that I consider technically difficult because of its small size, yet has some depth with a generally swift current.
Controlling this Coastal Cutthroat was pretty tricky in this small area with a 300 cm 5:5 rod. After pulling her out from the far log she fought well in the center of the small pool. She finally darted under the log in the foreground but was getting tired so I was able to easily hand-line her out into the net.
This slightly smaller guy darted for the undercut bank but was easily kept in the center of the pool.
This smaller guy was much easier to control and was the average size for the day.
The current at this fork where two braids join is fairly strong and this fish made the best of it.
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For a lot of reasons, 2020 has not offered up many opportunities to go fishing. Fortunately, I was (finally) able to sneak out last Tuesday. This was the only brookie I caught that had started to color up for spawn.
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My grandson caught a few warm water species. My smile was bigger than the fish. I was so proud of him tenkara fishing.! image|374x499
Not bad for a 2 1/2 year old.
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