Blaze orange vest for brook trout

[Okanagan]

An official tangent from nastygunz's comment about whether Pat was wearing blaze orange when he got his crossbow turkey.  (That reads like the title of a Reformation era sermon.)

In Fall, male brook trout swarm to the feet of someone wearing blaze orange or maybe pinkish orange orange.  Try it in the interest of science and report results.

I discovered this by accident when a friend and I stopped at a brook trout lake to fish for lunch, while I was wearing a homemade vest that was orangey pink in color.  The male brookies were in gaudy spawning color.  I stood on shore to cast a fly with spin gear and casting bubble.  Within 3 or 4 minutes at least 30 male brook trout were within ten feet of my boots, apparently looking up at my vest.  Instead of casting, I would reel the bubble to the rod tip and dangle the fly to dap it on the surface.  One after another I could lift out fat brook trout.

My friend had not brought fishing gear but he scrounged ten feet of discarded line snagged in a bush, tied it on a willow stick, borrowed a fly and dapped out fish one after another.  The skillet was going. 

I repeated that event one year later and then moved away and have never tried it since.  Wish I still had that weird color vest.

I tried to go to that lake last week but the snow was too deep to drive within 5 miles.  It is on a plateau and I barely made it half way up. 

The males were near shore and the females farther out in the lake.  A cast of 20 feet or more into the lake produced a female brook trout but any cast to within 10 feet of shore caught a male.

What we do in the interest of science...    nasty, you probably have way better access to brook trout than I do, if you care to continue this experiment, though it may be too late this year. 


 

[JohnP]

You can probably apply and get a multi-thousand dollar maybe even multi-million dollar government grant award for the study.   

[nastygunz]

 That is pretty dang interesting!

[FinsnFur]

Wait!...what?

[nastygunz]

Im trying it next spring.

[Okanagan]

Im trying it next spring.

I'll be curious as to how it will work for you, especially in spring.   The only times I tried it were in mid to late Fall, spawning season for the brook trout in that lake.  Only did it on one lake, a moose swamp kind of place, and we were hunting moose the first time I discovered this phenomenon.  We were near the lake and decided to catch some fish for lunch. I used a non-descript green sedge fly, basically a mostly green moth with some grey and maybe a bit of brown. 

I will try to post the color that they responded to here.  It was shaded toward a hot pink/reddish more than a true blaze orange.  I had a scrap of fabric that was highly visible and my daughter sewed up a hunting vest out of it. 

Added later:  Can't get the computer colors to blend into the shade I want.  Shade the orange toward red.  If you can come up with a few pieces of fabric  18 -24 inches square, you could try different shades.   

[nastygunz]

Dammitt idont own any hot pink

[riverboss]

Borrow some from Jim!! I'm sure he has some😁 after all he does have 2 daughters.

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[FinsnFur]

Dammitt idont own any hot pink

Whaaat everrr! You got tons of it and you know it.

[nastygunz]

"For the nieces" 😇😇😇