Spring fishing for brown trout

Finally made it back to fish the Adirondacks for brown trout for the first time since 2022. As usual, my fishing partner for this trip was my good friend Jimmy. He and I have fished for trout there on many occasions, for well over a decade, success rate is typically pretty good.

We got a late start, probably around 11 am or so. He started off casting a #2 spinner, and I used a #3 mepps XD spinner. Jimmy started off the day hooking a couple small trout, and I followed up with a decent fallfish.

Jimmy then followed up with a nicer brown trout, in the 13 inch range.

While he was able to cast a mile using a 10 foot rod spooled with ultralight line, I wasn't able to achieve the distance I wanted with the #3 Mepps. Luckily, I brought along a few bigger spinners, the heaviest of them being and old #5 classic Panther Martin spinner. 

Weighing about 1/4 ounce and throwing off a significantly big flash, I was hoping to tap into some of the larger brown trout in the 12 to 16 inch range. After missing a fish on my first cast, the second cast landed me a splendid 15 inch brown trout.

The success kept coming, despite the upsized lures. After landing 2 smaller brown trout in the 9-10 inch range, I followed up with back to back 14 and 15 inch fish again.

Eventually, Jimmy went up to a #4 spinner, and sure enough, he landed another good trout.

Although New York state allows a bag limit of 5 trout each, only 2 of the 5 can be over 12 inches. So, after keeping 4 big trout, we had to release another 3 trout in the 13-14 in range. We ended up keeping 5 more brown trout in the 9.5 to 10 inch range, and released a few smaller ones as well.

I ended the day landing a surprise perch, despite seeing hundreds of them staging to spawn right at my feet.