Brandon's BIG Brown Trout

A centerpin rod and reel.

Last week when I was fishing Lake Taneycomo in the trophy area (near Table Rock Dam) it was hard to miss a guy walking around with a two handed, 13 foot long fly rod type looking thing.  Admittedly, I pulled a jerk move and laughed at first, but quickly started to wonder if he might be on to something.  My jerkiness went away and my curiosity sparked.  I wasn't sure if it was a two handed fly rod, some sort of trolling rod, or something I had never heard about.  When our paths finally crossed, I noticed that he didn't have fly line on it, so that started to eliminate some possibilities.  We started talking and he was gracious enough to tell me about his set up.  He told me that he had caught about 6 fish so his credibility instantly went up.  It was called a centerpin rod and reel set up and was 13 and 1/2 feet long.  It also had had a custom, handmade John Milner center pin reel.  The set up was something that he used to catch steelhead in Ohio (where he was from) but he was down here with his family on vacation.  He was trying to catch some fish and was using small jigs (mainly a mega worm jig) under a pretty good sized bobber.  He could make a cast and then seemingly put the reel in free spool to over HUGE amounts of water .  I'm still not sure how he engaged a drag system when he hooked a fish, but I plan on learning more about this technique.  He was making LONG drifts and getting his jig in front of a lot of fish.  I started to think (and still think) that this guy might be on to something and that this technique has the possibility for kicking off some sort of trend.

No, this was not caught on Taneycomo.

Brandon and I parted ways and both got back to catching a few fish but soon ran into one another again.  I was fishing with my dad near the first outlet just downstream from the cable.  For those of you that don't know, this is one of the furthest upstream points that you can fish on Lake Taneycomo.  Brandon wasn't far away and was just upstream from us.  My dad had found a pretty good honey hole and was pulling in fish, after fish.  We then helped a 12 year old boy get on his first trout of the day and had just finished taking a few pictures of his prize when we noticed Brandon netting a fish.  I believe it was my dad that first said, "That's a nice fish."  As Brandon got closer, the fish got bigger and bigger.  To everyone's amazement, Brandon had caught a 22 inch and approximately 5 pound plus brown trout.  It was the biggest brown that I have ever seen landed on Lake Taneycomo.  He was incredibly excited with his catch and was concerned about helping his fish recover and released unharmed  It did indeed swim off and Brandon was going to head back to Ohio with a heck of a story.   I wonder if we are going to be seeing more centerpin set ups on Taneycomo?!