How do you make stocked trout edible?

[Gibbon]

I was completely unaware of a law against field dressing fish stream side. I too clean them leave the head and tail on and put them in a zip lock bag in my pack. I can see how this law came about though. People leaving the guts in grass in state, county parks with a lot of non angler use. Non anglers see it or their dog eats it and they are having a hissy fit.

 

[Bamboozle]

When I was about ten, we would always clean our trout on this one rock in a local stream. And drop the guts off the edge and watch them sink. After a while you could look back down and see a few crayfish getting their fill.

It was nice and deep there with the undercut going way back in under the big flat rock. One year a Big brown took up home here.

We probably gutted about 12 -15 trout here over the course of the year. For that whole year, not a single gut pile made it all the way to the bottom. He would come shooting out and eat the guts as they sank.

That image of that big dark brown trout eating guts like a channel catfish is burned into my memory. My friends and I just thought it was the coolest thing ever. It drastically changed the way my friends and I looked at big browns and their diet and the size of food they would eat. This discussion made me think of it.

~5footfenwick

Anybody have a decent fish guts fly pattern...?

 

[6xAdams(Jones)]

Non anglers see it and they are having a hissy fit.

Kind of like my reaction when smell and see the makeshift toilets at almost every canoe put-in/take-out along Pine Creek.

 

[TimMurphy]

Anybody have a decent fish guts fly pattern...?

Dear Bamboozle,

A size 2 woolly bugger dredged in the kidney scraped out of a stocked trout you kept should work! 😉

Just like Gunny Highway said, "Improvise, adapt, overcome!"

Regards,

Tim Murphy 🙂