April Browns, by Jorge Trucco

May 17, 2000

"You have no idea what this is going to be like, Jorge."
"What do you mean, Jim?"
"At some point you are going to start seeing monsters coming out of this river."

It was February of ‘94. Guide Jim Stibbs and I were scouting the lower section of the Collon-Cura River, where it flows into the then newly-built Piedra del Águila reservoir. We were watching how the trout were going crazy feeding on puyén minnows that proliferated by the billions right after the reservoir was formed. Browns and rainbows were splashing all over, and "herding" those minnows against the banks to eat them.

Some time later that season as we were shooting a "Fly Fishing The World" TV show with John Barrett and Robert Duvall, we witnessed exactly the same scene. We saw huge boils everywhere, the entire river was exploding and big fish were very aggressively attacking something while splashing here and there.

" Look at that! What are those fish supposed to be doing?" asked Robert.
"You won’t believe it Bobby, but they are going crazy feeding on these puyén minnows, and we are going to have a hard time getting them to take our flies," I replied.
We were able to get all that on camera, which made for a great show.

Jim Stibbs was right. Slowly but surely the new reservoir started to produce very big fish only we were not aware of it. We had some indications, though.
In March of ’96, guest David Fell landed a huge brown trout in the Collon-Cura River whilst fishing with guide Robert Ramsay. As Robert was driving to the river, his truck got stuck in the mud.
"You go ahead and fish, David, while I get it unstuck," said Robert.

Robert was half way through when he heard David yelling like crazy. Thirty minutes later David was landing a 15-pound brown trout. Robert claimed that this happened thanks to his superb guiding skills, of course.

During the late ’99 season two more monsters were caught. Guest Jonathan Tate landed a huge 31" brown in the Collon-Cura and guest Fred Whiting landed a 12-pound brown in the lower Chimehuín (the Chimehuín River flows into the Collon-Cura).

By then I was a bit confused. It was obvious that there were some monsters running up the Collon-Cura, but why weren’t we catching more of them?



I had a meeting with Alejandro del Valle, head of the Fish and Game Department. He told me that very possibly those huge browns "lived" in the reservoir all year and that they would run up the river only to spawn. This would happen only around the month of April every year (our fall).
I became highly interested to see if that was really the case; therefore I organized a four-day float trip with our guides on the Collon-Cura River during the last week of the season this year (around April 18). We never had a trip like this. The first one to land a 10 pounder was guide Diego Gaiser. We wondered whether that was a good sign or if it was just an accident. Pretty soon we were all catching monster browns. Guide Hernando Beschtedt caught the biggest one, about 15 pounds. The fish did like our olive zonkers, but the fly that really did great was Cathy Beck’s Superbugger.

Jim Stibbs wasn’t wrong back in 1994; we were starting to see the monsters. It was a memorable trip that was a tremendous amount of fun and, whatsmore, we now know what our guests and we are going to be doing in April from here on.