Craig and I decided to try a new trout park to close out the 2002/2003 C&R Season. Neither of us had ever fished Montauk Trout Park, having always decided to fish below the park at the Tan Vat Access of the Current River. I was pleasantly surprised with Montauk. In my first experience, the park is very different than Maramec Springs. Montauk has more of a “stream” appeal to it. I hooked a fish on my first cast with a partridge and orange, given to me by Brent. It slowed up a little. Craig and I did allot of tippet tying today, as it was so cold we were snapping our 7x tippet like crazy. Craig did hook into one really nice fish there, but it got off (hooked him long enough to make some noise in the shallow water, and allow us to see its back out of the water — it was a BIG fish). I mainly concentrated my efforts on this section of the stream, picking up the occasional fish here and there. I then decided to go try the C&R Fly Only water, and that is where I had most of my fun. The method that started hooking fish (and missing allot more), was stripping my tan/ginger mohair leech just over the moss covered bottom — the trout were coming to the fly like crazy. I caught 6 rainbows and one brown trout in a matter of 40 minutes. The fish were taking an emerger of sorts just below the surface, but I couldn’t match it and decided to stick with what was working. Craig met up with me and took several fish on a midge sized mosquito he had gotten in a fly swap. We spotted several large fish, including a truly MONSTER brown in this water, but couldn’t get him to bite. One thing that most impressed me with Montauk was the size of the fish we were catching (much larger than the average size at Meramec) and the beautiful colors of the fish. It made for a really long day trip — waking up at 3am and getting back home at 4pm — but it was worth it. Not a bad way to end the 2002/2003 Winter C&R season — we will definitely be back to Montauk next year for some C&R fishing. — Matt Tucker