One of the interesting things about fly fishing is the people you meet and the things you see along the way. Fishing the Margaree River for Atlantic Salmon this year, I ran into a lot of old friends and made some new ones. This brook trout (in Canada they are called Speckled Trout or ‘Specks’) accompanied me on several passes through a pool on the lower Margaree called The Snag Pool. He stuck with me in the eddy formed by my legs, and would appear again each time I got to a certain section of the pool.  In the beginning of the video clip, you might notice my Korkers and the shadow of my legs.
Weeks later, I got reacquainted with a fellow angler named Michael on the same pool. When I walked in, he informed me he was fishing with a ‘buddy’. I looked around and saw no one else in the pool. He pointed down and told me there was a rainbow trout that was keeping pace with him in the pool. On the next pass he let me know that first one and then another trout had joined the rainbow and one of them was a Speck. I walked in to see for myself, but I never saw those fish. Nonetheless, I wondered if the Speck was the same individual I had encountered there some time earlier.  I speculated that these fish were staying close to us for two reasons.  1.  Observe the video and note that this Brookie is constantly feeding  – darting back and forth, up and down, and picking up morsels with her mouth.  As I shuffled through the pool, my boots were dislodging plenty of nymphs and pupae for the opportunistic Brookie.  2. Trout will use any structure in the river to mitigate the force of the current and so conserve energy.  Michael advised me that he had fished the pool in the summer with his wife, who ‘waded wet’ (no waders, just bare legged with wading shoes).  She had trout as constant companions and they were nipping at her legs apparently pulling off tine flakes of dead skin.