The RAREST Trout I've EVER Caught 

Thanks for watching, and it’s gratifying to hear that my vids do some small bit of good by inspiring folks to get out there and fish hard!

Sounds like me Matt. Fly fished for a couple of years before I got it really figured out and started reliably catching fish. Shout out to the old man on the Farmington that taught me about using the correct tippet. Made all the difference. Tight lines.

Thanks so much!

Thanks for watching! I’ve been working on getting my old boat (a little 9’ Bass Tender that I bought when I was a teenager) back in working order for the last year or so. It’s going to be ready for the water soon, probably just in time for me to store it for the winter haha. But next year, I’m definitely going to be using it to fish stillwater more often for largemouth and smallmouth, so you can expect to see that getting worked in. Hell, might even use it to target pike, kokanee and more.

Once in a lifetime is probably right, but if I ever do manage to pull another tiger out of Secret Stream A, you know you guys will have a front-row seat!

Thanks for the kind words! I’ve been sitting on this footage since July, so I’m pleased I was able to put together a decent story with it.

Spending time on the Farmington? That phenomenon where fish are rising like crazy but selectively dodge your offerings, is a common plight. It’s a heavily pressured tailwater with fish that both well-educated and have access to so much food that they can afford to be unusually picky. If you do feel that you’re matching the naturals pretty close size-wise (#24 and smaller dries are all they’ll take some days at certain times), maybe try sizing down your tippet. I rarely use anything smaller than 5x, and only occasionally use 6x. But those finicky Farmington browns will sometimes require even lighter tippet than that in the summer months. Thanks for watching!

@@ConnecticutAngler Thanks for the info! I try to pick a different spot every week to fish either salt or fresh. Im in Stratford any recommendations on nice places to fish? I also do a bit of kayak fishing so Ive been checking out some local lakes.

I typically use #14 or #16 elk hair caddis for my small stream dry-droppers. Going larger would offer better buoyancy and visibility, but you'll likely find that small stream fish have trouble engulfing the fly in their mouths which translates to a higher ratio of missed takes. Any smaller than #16 you start running into problems also. The EHC needs sufficient buoyancy to stay afloat in spite of the tug of the nymph below and in spite of the turbulence of faster riffles. At #18 and below, the reduced buoyancy of the tinier EHC means it struggles to float in the face of those forces and it'll drown on you too often. The droppers I use typically vary between #14 and #18, favoring #16 and #18. Anything smaller than #18 are annoying in general, so I don't use them unless I feel like its really necessary.

Thanks for watching! And oh boy, lots to address here with limited space, but I'll do what I can. I buy maybe only a handful of tapered leaders each year and they get clipped down to the butt section fairly quick through ordinary use. But I'll use that butt section for a couple months usually and just build out my leader as needed very often. When I rig a dry-dropper, I generally tie a length of 0x on to the butt section, then a length of 1x, then 3x to the dry fly, then 5x to the dropper. I rarely find the need to go lighter 5x, honestly, but occasionally I may go 5x to the dry and 6x to the dropper. Since I'm building my leaders out on-the-go quickly, length is pretty variable from rigging to rigging. Generally, for my 7.5' 3wt, the full rig from the tip of the fly line to the dropper will end up being somewhere between 7' and 9'. While I carry fluoro, I use it less and less as time goes on. Personally, I just haven't found that it matters much... just my experience. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets phased out of my tippet line-up entirely soon. Length of tippet from the dry to dropper can vary depending on several factors. 1) How fast is the stream running? 2) What's the average depth? 3) Are there lots of deep holes scattered about? 4) How heavy is my nymph? The answers to these questions all play into it, though it'd be too much summarize here honestly. Suffice it to say, the length will usually run somewhere between 12" and 24". Dry-droppers need to be rigged with the specific stream in mind so that they strike the best compromise for that water. The dropper needs to be heavy enough to sink in the faster spots, but light enough not to bottom-out just 2 feet into a drift in slower spots. Tippet length plays into this too, because it'll affect how deeply the dropper can run in different water speeds.

@@ConnecticutAngler Thank you very much for taking the time to explain this to me. That is a lot of good information that I will employ. I have slowly converted from spin casting to fly fishing. I don't have any friends who fly fish so I am a lone wolf, but enjoy the experience. It would be a quicker learning experience if I had a friend to fish with, but there is a lot to say about the solitude and self accomplishment.

Well, from an anglers point of view, a wild tiger is a phenomenal catch. But they really don’t have any conservation significance… at least in the sense that you can’t conserve a sterile hybrid. If anything, the extent to which a wild tiger has conservation value is mostly just in signaling that a given stream has a self-sustaining population of both brookies and browns, which certainly is worth conserving. In the case of Connecticut though, a pretty massive effort has been made to assemble an electrosurvey database with thousands of sampling events since 1991 which covers most of the even vaguely fishable streams in the state… right down to teensy blue lines. I’m reasonably certain that they already know about this stream and its wild populations.

@@ConnecticutAngler very insightful and well said. Well keep at it! I grew up in New Haven County. There’s some neat water there.

The best that could be said is: exceptionally rare. It's a fascinating topic to me though, so I found myself writing two HUGE responses to this comment which ended up running WAY too long haha. I had to pull back and abbreviate. Bottom line is that the factors that might nudge the likelihood this way or that way are numerous, some aren't entirely understood, and some can even change over time in a given stream. But all of that being said, we're talking about nudging the overall likelihood around by minuscule fractions of a percentage point. The overall odds are heavily stacked *almost to an insurmountable degree* against a wild tiger hatching and surviving to a catchable size as this one did. It's probable that even within streams which meet all the basic prerequisites for tigers, literally zero tigers will be produced most years, if ever. So it's fair to say that most anglers, even those that spend LOTS of time on the water, will never catch a wild tiger. And of those that do, it's likely a once-in-a-lifetime catch; twice in a lifetime if they're really lucky.

Honestly, they are so rare that in some places rumors persist among some people that they are a myth. First you need a brown trout, which is not native (pre-colonial) to North America. It has to find a brook trout, which is pretty rare itself nowadays. The Brook trout has to lay eggs, and then a Brown trout (a fish of a different species) has to come and fertilize the eggs. That's pretty difficult because they have a different spawning season almost entirely with only a short overlap in the month of October. If a fertile brown trout manages find the eggs of a brook trout and try fertilizing them, most of the eggs will not be fertilized. Of the few that do get fertilized, most will never hatch due to complications. Of the ones that do hatch, most will get eaten as fry or fingerlings. To have one survive on its own in the wild is truly remarkable. Has to be one of the rarest events in nature. But in any river that contains both Brooke and brown trout, there is a tiny chance of catching a wild tiger. Amazing.

​@@stevez4600 a pretty good overview. If I'd add anything, it's that I think folks get it twisted with idea that tigers arise from bizarre instances of deliberate interspecies spawning between a brookie and a brown. I don't think that EVER happens. Instead, I would theorize that virtually all tigers are the result of purely accidental fertilization resulting from the two species spawning in close proximity. Either milt drifts downstream accidentally to a redd of the other species nearby, or in cases where there are numerous redds of the two species right alognside eachother, males may get confused about whose redd is whose. In virtually all cases, I would think the fish make entirely innocent mistakes; I don't think it's EVER intentional. I think this distinction, while maybe seeming inconsequential at face value, actual does matter because it would suggest that tigers, while ALWAYS rare, might occur more often in streams in which good spawning habitat is scarce, forcing browns and brookies to crowd those limited spawning areas at a greater density. The more crowded the spawners are, the more likely that mistakes happen. Purely a hypothesis on my part, but it makes more sense to me than the idea that brookies and browns would ever make a deliberate decision to spawn outside of their own species. And this might possibly play some role in why tigers may occur at a rate of, say, 1:500,000 adult trout on a certain stream (extremely rare, but not unheard of) versus a rate of maybe 1:10,000,000 adult trout on another stream (so rare that they are literally unheard of... "a myth").

Tiger trout occur in the wild, as this one did, in extremely rare instances in streams where browns and brookies share spawning habitat. The milt from a brookie accidentally fertilizes the eggs of a brown in a nearby redd. The chances of these cross-fertilized eggs producing viable young is, again, exceptionally low… which is why this is most likely a once-in-a-lifetime catch. It’s THAT rare. But it does happen sometimes, and that’s how you end up with a wild tiger. Now, you mention that tigers are sterile, which is correct. But all that means is that the wild tiger you saw in this video will never be able to spawn… it’s a dead-end in that sense. But wherever brookies and browns inhabit the same stream, there is always a chance, an infinitesimally small chance, of a new tiger arising from an accidentally cross-fertilized redd.

@@ConnecticutAngler awesome and informative reply thank you