The Farmington River comes out of the bottom of a dam in Connecticut’s northwest corner, which means it runs cold all summer when every other river in southern New England turns to bathwater. The brown trout there grow fat on the steady water and get very particular about what they eat, and a whole valley of fly shops exists to argue about it. In October the maples go off along the banks, the crowds thin, and the big browns that spent all summer ignoring you start chasing things that swim.
I fished the stretch below Riverton with a schoolteacher I will call Pete, who has fished the Farmington every October for twenty years and believes the river owes him a specific fish. He described it to me in the parking lot. Twenty four inches, hooked jaw, lives behind a particular rock, has eaten his fly twice and spit it both times. We waded in at eight with the mist coming off the water and the leaves coming down onto it, and Pete tied a yellow and olive streamer onto my leader with a knot he would not teach me.
The method is to cast across, let the fly swing down through the pool and strip it back along the bank in short pulls, so it looks like something small that has made a bad decision. Browns in the fall are territorial and a little mean, and they hit a streamer not because they are hungry but because it annoyed them. My first fish was a twelve inch brown that came out from under a log and hit the fly like it had been insulted. The second was bigger and did the thing a brown does, which is to go straight for the deepest, snaggiest piece of water within reach and sulk there.
Pete fished his rock for an hour with nothing to show for it, which he said was normal. I moved downstream and swung the streamer through a tailout where a maple leaned out over the water, and on the third pass the line stopped and then the river moved. It was not Pete’s fish, he was clear about that afterward, but it was nineteen inches of gold and butter with black spots the size of dimes, and it took me a long way downstream before it came to the net. I held it in the current until it decided to leave, and it went back to its spot like a man returning to his seat at a bar.
Pete landed two small ones and did not get his fish. On the walk out he said the big brown had probably seen us coming, that it knew his truck, that it had grown wise. I said it might have just been somewhere else. He said that was the kind of thing a person with a nineteen inch fish would say.
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