INTENSE Fight with Atlantic Salmon on the Fly 

I had been on a quest to get one of these salmon with a nymph (I’d only got them with streamers in the past), but I was skeptical that I’d get their attention with something small, so I tied up some huge, vaguely pheasant-tail-ish nymphs on #6 streamer hooks to fish under an indi. That big hook, with a bit more holding power, was probably what saved me during this fight. I was also running relatively heavy 3x tippet so that I’d have that extra breaking strength on my side. But yeah, even with all those precautions, those frantic leaps are still sooo damn risky!

The C&R-only season for these salmon runs until mid-December. After that, they can be kept. The rationale behind having a temporary C&R season is that these fish are generally larger than most stocked trout and therefore relatively few are raised and released by the hatchery. I think it’s 500 or so in the whole river and maybe another 500 in one other river in the state. It’s a very small, specialty opportunity for folks that are interested, but there’s only so many fish to go around. So keeping them from being cleaned out rapidly gives more folks a chance to enjoy catching one.

@@ConnecticutAngler Makes sense. Salmon have been completely fished out of my states rivers so it's good to know they're being taken care of elsewhere. Thanks for the reply!

Yeah, Tolland County is enough of a haul that if I’m gonna head all the way out there, I’m almost always taking that opportunity to hit a stream that I’ve never been to before. Variety is my bread and butter and there’s sooo much nice water out there to explore. Makes it hard to justify revisiting the same stream twice.

@@ConnecticutAngler I'm making plans to hit Farmington and a whole bunch of streams west of the CT River cause pretty much everything East in CT I've hit. Just got me a tiger the other day off of the Willimantic!

Oh for sure; it’s illegal to target anadromous Atlantics. Nobody reads the descriptions, which I totally understand since I don’t either, but I mentioned there that it was a landlocked fish. However, it’s worth mentioning that there is a common misconception, mostly coming from Northern New England it seems to me, that “Atlantic salmon” are only the anadromous forms, which isn’t the case. Actually, “landlock” is just a shortened nickname for “landlocked Atlantic salmon”. Both anadromous and landlocked types are still “Atlantic salmon”, as that’s just the general species name. Any member of that species (Salmo salar) is an “Atlantic salmon”, even if they’ve never swam in the Atlantic or been outside of a hatchery pool. We can also see how the idea of a salmon just being a “landlock” is problematic when you consider that Connecticut has landlocked sockeye salmon, too. Imagine if we called them just “landlocks” and also called our Atlantics just “landlocks”… talk about confusing!😂

​@@ConnecticutAnglerhere in Québec we call landlocked salmon Ouananiche. It's a native american name that means " the little one who's lost ". To me a landlocked salmon can't me an atlantic salmon because it never been to the atlantic. I know it's shares 100% of the same genetic but they don't grow as big and fight as hard.

For sure, compare a landlocked Atlantic salmon to a sea-run Atlantic salmon and you've got two fish of a very different caliber. It's just that calling them "landlocked salmon", while colloquially common, is totally ambiguous with regard to what species of salmon is being talked about. If we were to go to a place like Alaska and mention "landlocked salmon", they'd think you were talking about kokanee (landlocked sockeyes). So I definitely understand the distinction you're trying to make, and far be it from me to tell you how to refer to gamefish in your neck of the woods, but "Atlantic salmon" is just the generic species name and has nothing to do with whether or not the fish is sea-run.