Guide Ray Best first introduced me to “bass bug” fishing for Minipi brook trout. Neither streamer, nymph, nor dry fly generated any action on this particular day, years ago. Ray handed me a huge, green, deer hair bass frog, which I laughingly handed back, but he persisted and urged me to tie it on. So, more to humor him, although I was still not convinced that this was a sound and legitimate strategy for trout, I greased it thoroughly and cast it across the fast waters at the head of Woody’s Hole, which lies at the base of the flowage coming out of Anne Marie Lake. My jaw hung agape and my eyes bugged out when, on the first retrieve, I saw several huge fish chasing it through the rapids and bouncing the monstrous fly into the air with their snouts.

I recalled that experience several years ago on a return trip to the same lodge. “It was déjà vu all over again”, as Yogi Berra was wont to say. Similar conditions, similar slow fishing, same spot. I knotted on a large caribou hair lemming fly. On the second cast, as I stripped and popped it across the swirling water, the five-and-one-half-pound hen fish pictured here poked her dark snout into the air and pulled the bug down. The moral? Never leave home for Minipi without a few spun hair “bass bugs”, mice, lemmings, or frogs. They double as great “brook trout bugs”. Incidentally, since then I have also taken trout on regular hard-body, painted, cork popping bugs too.

You will fish these lures best with an eight-weight rod and line, and a relatively short and stout leader. Make your back cast stroke long and exaggerated, in an elliptical or slightly oval path, keeping constant pressure on the rod tip.