Sea-Run Brown Trout
May 11, 2008
Here in the U.S., we don’t have too much in the way of sea-run brown trout. There are, of course, lake-run brownies in tribs of the Great Lakes, a few remaining creeks on the East Coast and one isolated population in a river in along the West Coast that shall remain nameless.
I’m pretty fascinated by them, however. What’s not to like about a fish that can get as big as a Chinook and has an appetite for meat on par with a striped bass?
Of course, the Rio Grande and the Rio Gallegos in Tierra Del Fuego play host to some of the best sea troutin’ in the world, but I was unaware that there are still some places in Europe that host viable populations of salty browns.
According to Franklin Moquette, who is a biologist with a fisheries agency in the Netherlands, there are still some browns hanging around in western Europe in places like the River Rhine and the River Meuse.
In those streams, he says most browns are caught by accident, by anglers looking for other species, but they can sometimes be huge — up to 100 centimeters, which is nearly 40 inches!
In the photo above, Moquette is holding a 31-inch sea trout that was caught in the estuary of the River Mesue that was outfitted with transmitter/transponder and then released. With the transponder, biologists will be able to track the trout’s migration upstream and downstream the Rhine and Meuse Rivers.
“When we want to catch more seatrout, we go to Denmark,” he says. “There, we catch them in the brackish water of the Baltic Sea on flyrods or spinning gear! When, for the first time you wade into sea from a pebble beach, you think ‘I must be crazy’…But when you see small herring jumping out of the water and the big swirls of trout behind them, you quickly gain confidence.”
Moquette says that the Danes have stocked seatrout ’smolts’ directly into the sea to promote tourism!
Sounds like a road trip may be in order soon!
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