Guided Fly and Spey Fishing Trips for Steelhead and Brown Trout with
Fish Lake Run Outfitters
Pennsylvania Wild Trout
Pennsylvania Wild Trout
Steelhead and lake-run browns are our passion. Stream trout are our dirty little secret. We just love them! While some anglers value fish only for their size, we beg to differ. As anyone who has ever held a six inch wild brookie in their palm can tell you, sometimes beauty kills the beast. Which is why when the weather warms, and the steelhead and smallmouth run back for the lake, we start thinking of mountain streams and rivers and wild brook and brown trout in central Pennsylvania.
But perhaps our favorite thing is stripping big streamers for trophy wild trout. Watching a mid-twenty inch wild brown chase down and annihilate a six inch streamer is a blast. It's a physical game that requires long periods of casting on heavier sticks. It will wear out your shoulders. But keep at it and you will see giant trout.
Big trout eat meat. Day in day out, trout don't grow more than twenty inches, sometimes much more, feeding on bug hatches. That's not to say big trout will never be taken on dries, or that a match the hatch game will never yield a good sized fish. It's just that if a trophy wild stream trout is in your fishing differential, then the best place to start is stringing up a stout six or seven weight and start chucking six to eight inches of feathers and fur and hooks to the bank.
And the cool thing is there are plenty of ways to streamer fish for trout. You can get out the trout speys and swing the riffles with larger traditional streamers like matukas, buggers, and even single station composite streamers. You can huck big, heavy, jointed articulates to the overhanging brush and strip it out. Or you can dive headlong to the craziest surface attacks known to mankind and play the mouse game.
Where We Fish
Where We Fish
Basing out of the counties of Potter, McKean, and Elk in North-Central Pennsylvania, we have access to some of the best wild trout fisheries in the Eastern United States. Some you've heard of. Many you probably haven't. And that's by design. We keep looking for productive fisheries that fly under the radar, and tail our approach to the unconventional. You won't alway see us out there fishing the well known runs or the traditional evening hatches (though we do enough of that). We like to think outside the box.
Our guiding program makes the switch from chasing steelhead to searching mountain rivers and streams for trout on May 1 and, though trout fishing remains very good throughout the summer in all but the hottest stretches, prime time is from May 1 through June 30. During this time, we spend most our days looking for quality fish. I'm not trying to knock the wild 10-14" browns feeding on sulphers with a splashy rise at the typical wild trout fishery. They're fun. But we're looking for something special. Something that takes a big fly with a hard pull. We're looking for 20" or better fish. And we find them.
If the thought of hunting big, wild browns excites you, then you might want to give us a call. Let me be the first to tell you that we will work you looking for those fish. You'll be tired at the end of the day, maybe with a sore shoulder. But we see big trout almost every day.