My longtime love affair with brook trout.

Dave Richey with a 5 ½-pound brook trout.     A male in his fall spawning colors.

A small stream meanders out of some springs in the hills of northern Michigan, sneaks through a cedar swamp where it picks up a bit more water flow, and crosses under a dirt road with nothing more than a trickle.

State land abounds upstream and down from this dirt road, and occasionally I move into the cedars on the upstream side, and pay homage to all of the brook trout, both large and small, of the world.

There are places much larger than this where the trout feed on brookies the size that I catch, but that's of no matter to me. I'm here, and a nine-inch brook trout is an exceptional catch. I've fished some of North America's finest brook trout waters over the past 40-some years, caught fish to 6 1/2 pounds, and have loved every minute of each trip.

Brook trout come in all sizes and colorations, and  all are beautiful fish.

On this day I'm using a brass No. 0 Mepps with a single hook. The fishing is so simple, and the trout are so naive. I fish this area perhaps once each year, and sometimes will go two years without trying for them. In this case, it's been three years since it was last fished.

The tiny creek flows under and through the cedar roots, and the trick is to stand on one root wad, lower the wee spinner into the flowing water almost underfoot, and if a brook trout lives there, it will hit the spinner. I normally cut two hooks off the treble, and fish with a single hook so the fish are easier to unhook with doing any harm.

A gem of a fish jumped on my Mepps spinner, giving as spirited a battle as his six-inch size would allow, and kneeling down, I eased the hook from the undersized brook trout's jaw and set him free. Two root wads later, I was into another fish.

This one was a bit bigger, and had more pluck that the first fish. He tried to wind my line into the roots but I was able to keep it almost below my feet in the tiny pool of water he called home.

I kneeled, wet my hand, and the rod pressure skidded him into my palm. There was a sense of slippery fish, hard-fleshed and cold. One look at this brook trout was enough to make my day.

He was nine inches of beauty. The dark wormlike vermiculations on his back faded into a glistening array of beauty dotting his side. The wee red and blue haloed spots seem to sparkle like rubies and other rare jewels in the muted swamp sunlight. White racing stripes covered the outside edge of his fins, and this was a fish of a wild place where few  humans go.

Keep him or put him back. It didn't matter because he flopped a bit in my hands, and fell back into his living room. I was fine with that, and kept fishing but kept thinking of other brook trout from years past.

I remember a spectacular day in Algonquin Provincial Park north of Toronto, Ontario, where my wife and I, and two other anglers, carried two canoes into a small lake known to produce an occasional good fish.

We were using light-action spinning rods, reels stocked with six-pound monofilament, and a box containing three dozen Eppinger Devle Dogs in blue-silver, green-silver, orange-silver, all silver, pearl and copper colors. For whatever the reason, in some of Canada's tannic-acid stained lakes, the water color looks like weak tea, and a copper spoon works very well.

Casting copper spoons can pay off in  tannic-acid stained waters.

My wife, Kay, was the first to connect with a brookie hooked near  the end of a toppled tree that lay in the water. This fish was a lake fish, and not brightly colored like a stream brook trout, but what it lacked in pretty was made up for with size. She battled this big squaretail for five minutes before I slipped a net under 5 1/2 pounds of white-finned brook trout beauty.

She caught two fish that day from the canoe while I caught one from a big rock along the lake. My fish was decked out with the white piping along its fins, and one of Kay's fish fed the four hungry anglers. The others were released.

Brook trout are where you find them. Some are easy to catch like the small brookies from tiny streams, and others are large fish from some inland lakes. The lake fish, contrary to what it seemed with us catching three huge brook trout in a day, are far more difficult to catch in a lake.

It's a hit-or-miss situation, and quite frankly, anglers miss more often than they score. I used to fish a lake in Quebec north of Ottawa, and it produced a 6 1/2-pounder that I have mounted. However, I hooked and lost one potbellied brook trout of about nine pound near the canoe. The lure just fell out of its mouth and fluttered toward bottom, just like my spirits.

That lake was tested with a gill net once by the Quebec fisheries biologists, and they took one brook trout of over 12 pounds from it. That lake, sadly, was part of a lease some friends had on about 40 square miles of bush country.

Losing that Quebec lease was terrible to those who had built a small cabin on it.

That lease covered 45 lakes, but only two lakes held big brook trout. The others had pike and walleyes. Unfortunately, these friends lost the lease when the Quebec government dropped it, and it's anyone's guess if the lake still holds big trout. I've never had the heart to go back.

Brook trout always make me think of remote areas, cold water, and a wildly successful day or one where our arms get tired casting spoons or flies to fish that will not respond. And that is a good thing; if all brookies hit like that day my wife and I had in Algonquin Park, the water would soon hold other fish but the big brook trout would be gone.

Only anglers, with a strong will to not keep a limit catch, will save brook trout, wherever they are found.

Title: My longtime love affair with brook trout.

Tags: ((Dave, Richey, Michigan, outdoors, brook, trout, where, how, jump-, acriss, creeks, lakes, big, little))