The Ugliest Trout That I Have Ever Caught

I fished the San Juan river in New Mexico for two weeks last month, and I came away kinda disappointed. Not with the quality of the river, but with what results from the intense pressure it faces from the fly fishing industry. It’s the dark side of catch and release.

I’ve caught plenty of trout on the Madison river in Montana that have mangled jaws from being caught so many times. I wrote about it here a couple of years ago.

But I’ve never caught trout whose faces were so misshapen as I did on the San Juan.

One fish that ate my leech pattern had lockjaw, I literally could not open his mouth to retrieve my fly, and I had to let him swim away with it. Which it barely did, because even though the elapsed time from the yarn bobber dipping to netting the fish was 30 seconds, tops, it swam to the bottom at my feet and rolled on its side. I re-netted it and waded over to faster water where I held it nose first in the current until it kicked a little harder. When I re-released it, it again swam to the bottom at my feet and wobbled like an old drunk at closing time. I nudged it upright a couple of times with the butt of my rod, but eventually had to walk away and leave it to its fate.

I was surprised to learn that this river is stocked with rainbows. The day before I arrived, they had dumped over 100,000 little planters in. Some of the smaller fish I caught were perfectly shaped, though some had weird exposed gills and stubby fins from rubbing in the raceways at the hatchery.

An Unmolested San Juan Rainbow Trout — This rainbow was one of the least damaged specimens in my net over two weeks, but what’s up with that gill plate?

I wondered if the hatchery biologists clip off the maxillary, the piece of cartilage that runs along the upper jaw, because every large rainbow that I landed was missing it. A few smaller ones did retain it though, so I assume it is the result of being caught so many times. I watched some guides back-row a section called Cannon Run at least three times, when there were 12 boats in my line of sight. And apparently the Texas Hole sees that as a regular occurrence. It’s only like three miles from the put-in to the takeout at Crusher Hole.

The San Juan is touted as having ten thousand fish per mile, but it seems like that isn’t enough to keep them from being absolutely hammered by the high traffic floating above them.

The last fish I landed before departing was from the section called “Lunker Alley”, and it was in fact, a pretty substantial fish. For my last day, I had decided to give up on the tiny subsurface midge game, since I hadn’t caught a single fish on the sub-20 size flies (the majority of the fish I’d caught were on dry flies). I tied up some junk flies and was running a size 8 mop and an egg, which produced a nice brown and a couple of good missed fish from a side channel, but nothing from the main channel. I was picking up the last cast before switching to dry flies when this fish appeared on the end of my tippet. No grab, no diving indicator, just, “oh, a fish”.

It was indeed, the ugliest trout that I have ever caught. Its lower jaw was a stump, missing maxillary, and it looked as though it came from Jim Henson’s Muppet shop, Statler and Waldorf come to mind…

It had no urge to fight either. Like the other older fish I’d netted, which were not many in number, it seemed to have learned that there is no benefit to struggling, as the human on the other end would just let him go either way. It flopped around and I netted it inside 10 seconds.

“Make up your mind!”, I can hear you thinking. Do I want a fish to put up a fight and end up mangled, or quickly submit and swim away unmolested? Shit, I don’t even know. I’d prefer to catch fish that have never seen a human before, but that’s increasingly unlikely.

I’ve caught some absolutely pristine, beautiful fish out of the Madison and the lakes along its length. I’ve also contributed to the pressure they face, and I’ve foul hooked my share, with poked eyeballs the worst of it. That always makes me feel really awful.

Fly fishing has its ups and downs for sure, but I don’t know what the hell else I’d do if I gave it up. I think about quitting from time to time. I suppose the best I can do is to avoid the most highly pressured waters and fish as ethically as I can while there. Barbless hooks all the time. Pick up others’ trash. And try not to be an asshole (that one’s really hard sometimes).

Here’s a selection of some of the sorrier looking fish I’ve landed over the last few years.