Trout Fishing in Kyrgyzstan: The River You've Never Heard Of

A few years ago I was living in Florida, carving fishing lures in my apartment and selling them through Facebook fishing communities. Balsa wood, Japanese-inspired minnows and jerkbaits — I'd been obsessing over makers like Yo-Zuri, IMA, and Itocraft for years, and eventually started building my own. I called the brand ZBS Craft. Zee Best. The bass series was called Bassassin. They worked well enough on Florida largemouth that I sold around 40 of them.

Then I came home to Kyrgyzstan.

The trout series is called Twitchmaster. Last summer on the Suusamyr river, at about 2,200 meters in the Tien Shan mountains, a Sevan trout just under 4 kg took one in less than a meter of gin-clear water. Clear enough that I watched the whole thing happen before it happened, if that makes sense. That fish, on that river, on a lure I built myself — I'm not sure I'll top that combination any time soon.

What You're Actually Catching

The Sevan trout (Salmo ischchan) is IUCN-listed Endangered. Its native home is Lake Sevan in Armenia, where the population has largely collapsed. Decades ago the fish were introduced to Kyrgyzstan's high-altitude lakes and rivers. They adapted, grew faster than they ever did at home, and the healthiest wild population of this species on earth is now here, in these mountains, largely unknown to the international fishing community.

Alongside the Sevan trout, the Amu-Darya brown trout (Salmo trutta oxianus) is the actual native wild brown of the Tien Shan — not a fish you'll find in any Western catalogue. It lives in the Chon-Kemin, the Kökömeren, the upper Naryn, and responds well to hard baits and spinners. And there's wild rainbow trout too, naturalized from old stockings, now breeding freely in several systems. Familiar enough that you'll know how to fish it.