Clayton Stewart of Las Vegas, Nev., shares Moss’ enthusiasm for Minersville. He regularly makes the three-hour drive from the city along with his older brother, Beau Stewart, and uncle, Todd Boyer. Boyer first introduced his nephews to Minersville when Clayton was just 15 years old, but he hadn’t been there for several years. Then in the spring of 2006, the trio heard “from everybody that ice-off is really good at Minersville. So we went back -- missed ice-off. But it was still really good.”

The group found the fishing at Minersville to their liking, but that didn’t stop them from trying their rods at other popular fly-fishing destinations. Before long, however, they found their way back.

“We had been toying around going to Kolob (near Cedar City, Utah) and Sunnyside (Central Nevada) and everything. But once we hit Minersville in the late spring, it was incomparable to anything else.”

The fish, Clayton Stewart said, were “that much bigger and that much harder-fighting. They’re a lot healthier fish than everywhere else we’ve been to. They’ll put a good bend on your pole, especially when they get running and stuff.

“I had one the first day we got out there. We didn’t know what was out there. I hooked into one off the bottom, and it took my line out a good 20 yards in the blink of an eye.

“Before I could even know what was going on, my finger kind of tapped the reel, and it just broke off. I have no idea how big that fish was, but he just took off and he was really heavy.

“I’ve had a few that have pulled my pole down into the water. You’re sitting there fighting them and all of a sudden, BOOM! It just takes you down, and you have to loosen up your drag so they play a little bit.”

The younger Stewart’s largest catch to date went about 25 inches in length and weighed in the neighborhood of 5 pounds. On his best day, 30 rainbows made it into his net.

“I was killing ‘em a lot more than everybody else, but everybody caught around 20 that day,” he said. “And a lot of those were 20-inch fish. When the big ones start feeding, you won’t catch anything below 19. And mostly, you’ll be catching fish around 20 to 21 inches.”

One might expect fish this size to really slam the fly, but Stewart said that generally isn’t the case. “A lot of times they don’t really hit hard. They just kind of suck it in, and you think you have a snag.”

In addition to the trophy regulations that govern Minersville’s anglers, another factor in its emergence as a trophy trout fishery is the abundance of crayfish in the reservoir. For big rainbows, that is tantamount to a giant smorgasbord, and they’ll actively feed on them.

With that in mind, Moss and Stewart both recommend flies that imitate a crayfish.

“They have to be feeding on crayfish. There’s millions and millions of crayfish in there. We can’t find anything else. Even when the hatches come off, there’s not many bugs that come off the water. Most of the time, they’re hitting those Woolly Buggers, so we think they’re going after crayfish,” said Stewart.