Catching Up with Kara
Early in October, a family reunion brought our only daughter, Kara, back to Utah for a few days, and one Friday she joined me for a father-daughter trip to Strawberry Reservoir to catch cutthroat trout on jerkbaits.
Having just taught a seminar earlier that week at Sportsman’s Warehouse in Provo, I was very excited to get back out on Strawberry, especially after seeing that the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (UDWR) has begun its fall stocking of seven to 10-inch rainbows.
Each year (when the stocking begins) the cutthroats begin feeding on the rainbows as if there were no tomorrow. But that (as they say) is where the story begins.
Figuring Out the Bite
Kara and I arrived at Strawberry just after 7:00 a.m. to a cool, brisk wind although the air temperature was just a few degrees below freezing (27 degrees). We launched the boat, and discovered we had no power to the large motor. We didn’t want to go back home, so I dropped the trolling motor (it runs on a separate electrical system) and began to fish. Kara used a KVD suspending jerkbait made by Strike King Lures while I threw a LuckyCraft Pointer 100 minnow, and just off the launch ramp we both caught our first fish, two 20-inch cutthroats that aggressively hit our lures while “dead sticking” after beginning a normal retrieve.
At times, cutthroats at Strawberry seem to want a lure with little movement. Other times, they will chase your lures all the way to the boat. That day, they wanted the lures completely still, and wouldn’t strike if they moved rapidly towards the boat.
Kara has always been a patient angler so as she began to understand what the fish wanted, she quietly began hooking and putting fish in the boat. She caught at least six fish before I caught my second. Her method was very straight forward. She made her cast to the outside edges of the grass whether on a point or back into a cove, pointed her rod toward the water and gave three or four quick jerks down which took her lure to around 5 feet below the surface.
This was where the magic began. She would keep her rod tip still and would only reel after nearly 30 seconds waiting for the cutthroats to locate her presentation. Then (ever so slowly) she moved the lure towards the boat, jerking once or twice a minute – no more.
The trout “smashed” her lure in the middle of the retrieve but several times struck within a yard of the boat. She was like a kid at Christmas each time she hooked a fish.
Catching a Lunker
While we continued on the electric trolling motor we headed across some open water and found ourselves near the campground on the southwest side of Strawberry Bay. We both caught trout averaging 20-plus inches in length and four or five just over 22 inches when Kara hooked a fish that surprised her.
“Daddy, I think I need the net,” she said, as I quickly reeled in and grabbed the net. “This one is huge!” As she carefully played the fish I was impressed with its length and girth. After a couple of last second runs, the fish swam into the net and I hoisted it into the boat and then realized this was a true trophy cutthroat.
Kara had just boated a 25.5-inch nine-pound trout.
We continued to fish until noon and between the two of us caught close to 35 fish and found a couple of spots that produced several “doubles” (both of us playing fish at the same time). In all, the day couldn’t have been better.
As Kara put it, “the fish seemed lazy with so much food in the water. They didn’t need to chase our lures, they just struck because our lures were the slowest moving baitfish in the school.”
My 32-year-old daughter understood the fish better than I. What a joy it was to “catch up with Kara” while doing what we both love — catching huge fish.
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