None of that would preclude me from fishing somewhere at night. Just watch your backcast and figure out a way to land the fish if you hook it.
The formula to catch big browns is:
1) (Most importantly) - fish streams that are likely or that you know have them in.
2) Fish during times when big browns feed - high water or at night will bring them out of the cover they normal would hang out during the day
3) As an antithesis to #2, if you do happen to find a big brown out in the day, like you did, do like you did and toss a few different things at it. I recently caught a 21" brown in a stream that matched criteria #1 above. It was Super Bowl Sunday, a bit chilly and water temps weren't much above freezing. I was fishing a streamer initially and didn't move anything in the pool, so I moved up to take a closer look. I visually identified what I thought was either a fish shaped sandbar or a fish, sitting perpendicular to the top flow of the stream through the pool and proceeded to cycle through a number of flies. The sandbar didn't take the anything, but on about the third drift of an egg pattern, it turned into a 21" brown. I don't know if it struck out of frustration or decided it wanted to be a rainbow trout, but it was a nice wild fish.
4) Don't tell neighbor kids about big fish.
