By really deep holes, I mean the nicest, biggest, deepest ones on the stream. On decent (or better) Brookie streams, I usually find that these holes have a fairly consistent mix of fish...one or two 7-8 inchers, a bunch of 4-6 inchers, and a few dinks that managed to get just big enough to avoid being eaten by the alphas of the hole. You obviously only catch a couple out of the hole each trip, but adding up my experiences, this seems about right...again on Brookie streams with at least decent populations...Class B or better I guess.

But every once in a while I come across a hole that's a real head-scratcher. There should be fish there, but there aren't, or at least I can't catch them. As I've gotten more confident in my fishing I've come to realize that a possible explanation for this is that there may only be one fish in that hole...albeit a big one. If most fish in the stream top out at 7-8" then these are the holes were the 10+ inchers live. Even if I'm fishing dries I often make it a point with these holes (where I've struggled in the past) to take the time to tie on a small weighted streamer for the first few casts...just in case.

One of the streams I fished today has a hole like this. I've fished it 3 or 4 times in the last two years and have never gotten a single hit in the biggest, deepest hole on the stream. Well today my suspicions were confirmed...PB wild freestone Brookie...13". Very subtle take on a dead drifted size 14 BH Bugger...just felt like a snag until she shook her head.

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Very nice ...

nice! You were out today? You're the MAN. :)

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It was really just out of frustration...I have a very busy March (wedding, nephew's first Bday) as far as weekends go, so I know my fishing opportunities will be limited for a while. All the streams I fished today were on the E or SE side of ridges too, which helped from a wind perspective. There were still a few wind gusts that had to top 40 mph though...they def had me looking up to make sure nothing was going to come crashing down on my head!

That is a great fish. Congratulations!
Merf

Very nice Matt. You sure that's not a stocker

Awsome fish!

Not brookies, but on a small wild bow stream something similar happened to me. I only fished this stream maybe 4 times in the past 3 years, but everytime I usually catch a few small bows and even a small brown in the smaller runs and such. There was this one deep hole I came across and could not catch a single fish out of it. Every time I visited the stream I made some casts in it but could catch anything each time, although the hole was deep and had lots of good structure in it, and you would think it would hold a bunch of fish. Well one time my brother came along with me and on one of his first casts in that hole he managed to pull out a 13 inch brown! The hole was plenty big enough to hold many smaller fish, but apparently that big brown didn't want any company!

It's a beautiful fish.
Very large for a wild fish but I think I'd vote wild. The clincher for me is the deep red pelvic and ventral fins. Usually stocked brooked trout have fins that lean more to the orange tones. Wild brookies usually have deep red fins and they retain these despite washed out flank tones and spots.

Nice!

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's wild. The stream it came from is very small, and to my knowledge has never been stocked...definitely not recently. The stream it is a tributary to is also not stocked, although other tribs of that stream are. In order for a stocked fish to have gotten to this point, it would have had to go down the trib it was stocked in, into the larger stream, and then up this trib. Unlikely I think, but with the floods this past year, possible I suppose. The fact that I haven't caught a single fish in this hole in two years leads me to believe that this fish may have been there during that time frame, which would have been before this year's floods.

It's a pretty standard Winter color tone for the wild fish in this watershed. They tend to be paler with a more silver tone across the board for some reason. I also suspect this fish is a female.

You can never really be 100% sure I guess, but I'm north of 90% on this one.

That certainly is a nice fish, bigger than any wild brookie I ever caught. I am at least as impressed that you fished today. My wife thinks I'm nuts, but even I didn't try to fish today--walked the dog on a groomed trail instead, and it was really blustery.

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Really nice fish and boy do I know how you feel watching your head. Things was falling a wee bit too much for my likin today.

At this point this is going to sound redundant, but nice fish! I have scored a few brookies of that calibre in my day, definitely something to be proud of.

Great fish... There really are some bigger brookies out there, and after catching a lot of small brookies they look a little bit like sharks !

I have had the same problem on several brookie streams I fish. However, I always just attributed it to fish that are down that deep, just being unwilling to rise such a long way for a dry fly. Or at least it would take a pretty heavy hatch to get them to come up.