A friend of mine, Joe Phillips, is having shoulder surgery today, so he asked me to go out with him for a last hurrah yesterday before he had to hang up the fishing gear for a couple months. Joe is a big-fish kinda guy. He knows where they live, and he knows how to catch them. Not that he doesn't also enjoy chasing little brookies on our local mountain stream, but the big ones are his real passion.

He took me to one of his local hotspots (which shall remain nameless), and we fished for most of the morning with just spotty luck. I was fishing streamers the whole time, but the fish weren't really committing to the strike, and we both felt lots of tugs that didn't amount to hookups. Between us, we caught perhaps 10 browns in the 12- to 15-inch range. That's pretty good luck for most of us, but Joe really wanted us to bag a bigboy.

I had to go to work by lunchtime, and when I saw it was past 11 I was ready to leave. But Joe convinced me to try one more spot.

We had to scramble down a really steep hill, but the run at the bottom was gorgeous--a riffle turned into a deep run against some riprap before it emptied into a deep hole. Joe allowed me the honors of the first pass through, and then he'd come in behind me. I got a hit on my first cast and then proceeded to catch three decent browns as I worked downstream. After the last one, I said, "Okay, I'm gonna end on this fish and call it a day." But Joe said, "Why don't you fish downstream a little more to where the hole starts to shallow out?"

When I was a guide, I learned a really valuable lesson: Always listen to your guide. So, I kept at it. Four casts later, the fly simply stopped midway through the swing. There was no tug or sharp strike: it just stopped. When I came tight, I felt serious resistance, and then the fish started to shake its head. The first time it came to the surface, I almost swallowed my tongue. It was a huge slab of green, red, and white--a much bigger rainbow than I'd ever expected to see in this river.

The fight wasn't terribly dramatic, although the fish ran hard across the pool a couple of times and rolled on the surface quite a bit. Those last few seconds before a big fish is in the net are always nerve-wracking, but Joe managed to scoop the beast. When I got a good look at it, I saw this:

It was the biggest wild rainbow I've ever caught outside Alaska. We neither weighed nor measured it, but I figure it was well over 20 inches and more than 4 pounds. Adrenaline may have made it seem bigger. No matter, I was pretty happy:

After a whole summer of catching little brookies (which I still love), it felt great to cradle something with a bit of heft.

Thanks, Joe! Get well soon.