2-18 SS Ryan's Brown

It's funny how you pick up stories from sportsmen. My girlfriend was having coffee in Starbucks, make that 10 bucks, and she was sitting next to this very nice guy, Ryan McCullough. She told him that I did Sportsmen's Spotlight and he said have him give me a call. "When I was 12 years old I started floating bobbers down the rivers in the mountains of northern California. When I saw a couple of fly fisherman I decided from that moment on that I was going to do that someday and I got the chance when I was about 32 years old to start and I have been flyfishing for seven years. I had a steep learning curve coming over here to Idaho learning everything that is different from the rain forest streams of Washington where I started to learn. One of my favorite places has been on the Owyhee River in Oregon. I just had a real passion for chasing those big brown trout and being real stealthy about it. One day in particular I was able to get into the largest fish that I have ever been able to land. It ended up being a brown trout that we thought was between 6 1/2 to 7 pounds and it measured out to be a 26 and three-quarter inch fish. I noticed it because it was leaving softball size dimples on the water so I decided I was going after this one very carefully. It was the biggest fish I had ever seen come to the surface. When they get to that size, they don't grab flies off the surface of the water in the manner of smaller fish. They open their mouth below the surface and it creates a vacuum and they call that sipping.