cured and any holes were noted so we wouldn't fall into them during darkness. We looked for a good battle position on the water's edge and an easy place for netting. We went to Cabela's and bought a pair of headlamps. Now what were we going to use to catch this Leviathan? We decided to be pre-pared for many ways to tempt this trout. We were going to time our assault on it to coincide with the Hex hatch. The Hex hatch was late this year because of the major flooding. A trip to a local fly shop was in order. We got a couple Hex pat-terns and a couple mouse patterns. We strung up the 5- weight fly rod with a 3x leader and the Hex Emerger pattern. We had heard of recent Hex hatches in the area. We also got out a spinning rod and put 8 pound Fireline on it and a size 6 Eagle Claw with a small split shot part way up the line. We decided that if one method failed, we would try the other. I stopped at the local Kwik Trip, bought a dozen night crawlers and went fishing for chubs. I caught six chubs and cut off their tails about one inch up from the tail. Now we were ready. Night crawlers and chub tails and a readied fly rod. We also had some size 9 floating Rapalas in rainbow color ( they don't make brookie color). The alarm rang at 2: 00 AM. I picked up Joe and off we went for our night time adventure. I parked the truck quite a ways from the normal parking spot. I wanted to have every possible advan-tage. We walked slowly to the woods edge. I put on my headlamp, but told Joe to leave his turned off. The approach to the hole seemed like it took an eternity. I turned mine off quite a ways from the hole. Joe wanted to get right in there with a chub tail, but I told him we needed to look and listen for a while. We actually took a seat for about ten minutes. We both looked at each other at the same time. Joe said, " what the heck was that sound"? I told Joe it was a slurp sound. I had read about the sound in many fly fishing magazines, but had never heard it for myself. We sat there a little longer and the sound got closer to our battle station. I handed Joe the fly rod and told him to have at it. There was a Hex hatch going on and we had stumbled on it. It was actually quite intimidating cast-ing in the pitch black. I told Joe to cast toward the slurping sounds. Joe asked me how he would know when to set the hook. I told him to set after he heard the slurp. The first cast in the large beaver dam was off target. Joe put his second cast near the sounds. It seemed almost instantaneous - there it was: the slurp sound. Joe set it hard. The fish went directly to the bottom and hunkered down. It did a figure eight a couple times. I don't think it knew

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