On the cusp of autumn here in the northeast, I took not a one (as mandated by the holiday) but a two day respite from my, um, labors and fished both Sunday and Monday.
The trico fishing on the Little Lehigh has been spotty of late as summer wanes. Even on the warmest recent mornings, the expected clouds of spinners have failed to coalesce to any significant degree; one encounters only a handful of rising fish in any given pool; and those paltry few only continue rising for perhaps an hour.
But Saturday evening I had tied up a bunch of Griffith's gnats with wispy muskrat under-fur shucks in various sizes and was eager to try them. I had found the pattern in Ed Engle's book, Tying Small Flies, in which he commends it highly. Aside from Engle's testimonial, it appealed to me owing to the use of muskrat for the trailing shuck. I can't vouch for the efficacy of muskrat as a shuck material vis a vis various other natural or synthetic substances, but I've found having a dead muskrat on my desk to be extremely efficacious at keeping Mme. Cloozoe and the little Cloozoes at bay, thus allowing me to tie undisturbed.
The fishing Sunday morning was as it had been of late; not much of a hatch or spinner fall and a mere smattering of sporadically rising fish who had honed over the summer the unerring ability to discern the artificiality of a trico pattern of whatever design or size.
But I had a long stretch of the stream to myself, caught a couple of small trout and -- just as I was about to call it a day -- hooked and landed the last fish I saw rising; a good sized brown of fine color. I caught him at end of a long, tricky cast through a stiff breeze over conflicting currents on the smallest of my muskrat-augmented Griffith's gnats. On that note, I patted myself vigorously on the back, de-rigged, and drove home happy.
Monday I decided to check in on my favorite Brookie stream. A small, rocky creek that I've only ever showed to one other person, I worry about it every summer and every winter and am always relieved each spring and fall to find it in good shape and still containing a healthy population of its own beautiful strain of wild fish.
I usually don't start fishing this stream until about the middle of September, but we've had mostly prematurely cool nights starting in late August and in any event the creek and surroundings are so lovely that a trip there is never wasted regardless of the productiveness of the fishing.
The nature of said fishing could hardly be more different than the hyper-technical variety practiced on the Little Lehigh, of course. You fish a creek like this with a six or seven foot rod. A six or seven foot leader is plenty long enough and 5x tippet is more than fine enough. The fish typically aren't fussy about pattern or size (except on rare occasions when -- inexplicably -- they are) and although you almost never see a fish rise, a good cast to a promising-looking spot is apt to be rewarded with a slashing take that quickens the heart by a wild brook trout that appears, seemingly, out of nowhere.
I arrived at the brook to find the water levels a bit lower than I had hoped, but not disturbingly so, and the water temperature nice and cold. I tied on a good sized winged cinnamon ant which I had selected almost (but not quite) arbitrarily, and on the first cast to the second pool I tried I was fast to a good sized fish.
"Good sized" must be taken in context, of course. In this creek it means an eight or nine inch fish. The largest I've caught was a deep bodied twelve-incher -- a veritable leviathan in these waters.
I worked my way up the stream for a few hours, catching fish steadily, pausing frequently to sit on a rock and smoke and daydream.
Not everyone likes this kind of fishing and not everyone is good at it, (the fish may not be selective and you've got to be pretty damned ham-handed to break one off, but they are easily spooked by clumsy or indifferent stalking and your casts, although not long, must be accurate, sometimes creative, and on the mark on the first attempt with little or no false casting) but those of us who do like it tend to like it a lot.
No comments:
Post a Comment