What a fun discussion. I wish I could hook browns as easily as you cats roped me into the discussion! My mouth is bleeding.
The Kelly Galloup school has many many merits and I even called him personally a while back to order flies and get suggestions. Two years later I finally took a fish on one of his flies; a 16" rainbow on a woolhead rainbow pattern of his that is about 5 inches long! Oh well ...
Ok seriously, that said, I have been fishing a version of the Circus Peanut long before I knew of the Circus Peanut and also use a non-articulated version. This landed me a brown a year ago of about 27+ inches on a west slope river here in California. As browns are want to be, this incident was rife with irony. Let me explain. Earlier that day, thinking of previous brown encounters I crept up upon a deep frog water eddy and deliberately slammed an articulated slump-buster on the surface and the water exploded. The fish was easily 2 feet long and immediately sped downstream. River was pushing 700+ cfs. The fight didn't last long. I would have straightened the hook or broken the line ( 2x ) if I stood my ground and swimming to free the line from a submerged boulder was like flying a kite in a tornado and I was the kite. I tried three times with a mask that I keep handy. The current was too strong. Not joking. This was very consistent with Kelly's assessment of hog browns sometimes being VERY shallow and attacking on the surface. The rush is worth a million bucks and is more like a LMB attack.
More irony: So later that day I fished and hiked and fished and hiked and stumbled upon a plunge full of big bows. This became fun and consoled me from my loss which still was eating at me. As dusk kicked-in, a huge shadow chased one of my bows but darted back to the dim depths. Trembling, I switched rigs, and lobbed a streamer on a sinking line and a "Ridiculous" which is like a single section version of the C. peanut. Third swing got the take and the brown. That's still my best brown story as well as my personal best. Here's the money shot:
http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x163/BernardYin/Pure%20Fishing/attheendoftherainbow.jpg.
Obviously, I also believe that bringing the fly to them is helpful and if they are deep, there are loads of time when they will STAY deep. I do a lot of tactless jigging with heavy flies into holes and crevices.
I continue to hunt them and have lost count of the number of times a good brown has taken a bow from me. Intercepting migratory fish is fun and I recently racked up a 30+ fish day with none under 15" yet none were over 19" either. Not that I am complaining
This of course depends on watershed and timing.
These fish are fickle and hard to predict. The soft rules like dawn and dusk (or nighttime) are very helpful and YES YES YES knowing where they are likeliest to be is very helpful. Seasonal factors and flows also help determine how holding water will behave. I watch stream gauges like a hawk. THAT is a whole other discussion and really helps with hunting bows as well.
My most recent trip had me on a hole where almost zero rainbows were to be found and this was far from more accessible areas. I and my buddy are convinced that the hole is/was dominated by a beast or two because it was too sexy to have so few fish. Once this paid off for me in the local So Cal mountains where I noticed the deadness of a spot and gambled on a cast to the deepest darkest corner and lo and behold I got a nice brown.
Jeez how many tricks are there? Here's a great one: Cast from far away! I'll cast over 20 feet of meadow and boulder to drop a fly over the edge of a spot and look for the rings/wake from a take. Damaged fly line or spooked trophy? You take your pick! The recent Field and Stream ( gasp! ) has a funny one where they suggest drifting a streamer into an undercut on a leaf! In other words, don't spook your quarry! I have also learned tons from friends and I have a few with whom we constantly exchange emails, texts and such. We're idiots and poisoned by browns.
In the end, the biggest ingredient is persistence. They are pretty fish and diabolically attractive. I love wild bows especially if of size and strengthened by fast water but browns are hard to not obsess over.
Whew!
B