February debuts, and I have tied my first half-dozen Baby Crickets for the coming season. No wonder my thoughts drift back to my years of limestone meanderings…

The creation of that pattern is nearly lost in time. My best guess tells me The Baby was born fairly early during my fling as the owner of my own fly shop, so perhaps 1994? So, for more than three decades, I have stalked trout in the warm seasons of the year and taken countless numbers of trout on this little black dry fly. It’s effectiveness was not limited to the limestone springs, far from it, for it was a mainstay on freestone and tailwater rivers, a gem wherever I angled. Big trout have not grown tired of it yet!

I was introduced to a friend of a friend who joined me on Massachusetts’ Deerfield River, my Grandfather’s home water when the fly was new. Paul grew fond of the way the Baby Cricket tempted those Berkshire browns and rainbows when I shared the contents of my fly box. I tied a dozen or two and sent them to him after our meeting.

I used to fish quite often in February back then, the limestone springs gushing fifty-two degree water on the coldest winter days. The last half of this second month would sometimes offer rises from a handful of good trout and by March there would be little black stoneflies and blue-winged olives about whenever the weak sunshine warmed the day a touch.

The fishing invariably presented challenges, even after twenty years stalking the Cumberland Valley’s springs, and it was that sublime challenge that first drew me there and ever mesmerized on all those angling days.

Many have written how the confidence in a fly makes for the angler’s best presentation and fishing. I tend to agree, thus The Baby still finds itself on my tippet when warm days bless my journeys along bright waters!

This winter seems colder and snowier than last, and it is certainly quieter for me. Last January I began a journey on what would become a very long road, a trying project for me, the making of my own split bamboo fly rod. My friend John had invited me to join him in the Catskill Rodmakers Workshop at CFFCM to see if I could learn to transform an internode of Vietnamese Lo o bamboo into a classically styled three-piece trout rod.

Winter weather kept us away from the rod shop on many weekends, and there were other events on some of our work days that challenged my concentration. I discovered some new pain centers in my hands, wrists and shoulders, thanks to the repetitive motions required to plane twenty-four strips of bamboo with a hand plane and steel planing form.

There were setbacks thanks to the learning curve, and though John remained positive, my enthusiasm was dealt a few blows that made success seem very unlikely at times. The rod was completed, though not for the spring fishing season as originally envisioned. Eight months were required to log some eighty hours of shop time, but I walked away with an even greater respect and appreciation for my rodmaking friends and acquaintances, and a very nice 7’9″ dry fly rod.

When my thoughts turn back and cast through those eighty hours, I wish I could do it again and again. It was a great feeling to finally slip a favorite reel into the reel seat and thread a fly line through the guides. An even better feeling to cast the rod for that first time, my smile beaming across my face. Ah, to be a much younger man with time on my hands and a suitable shop of my own!

The negative side of the experience involves those new aches and pains, particularly the “moderately severe” arthritis which now resides in the wrist of my casting hand. Rod work wasn’t solely responsible for that, though it certainly did advance it to the point that I sometimes fear my casting may go before the rest of me does.

That arthritis makes it clear that there will not be another rod project in my future. That doesn’t mean that I won’t still hang around and watch the craft, or talk with rodmakers, or read about the history of the great Catskill rodmakers. Getting a taste of the work itself makes everything I love about cane rods and fly fishing even more enjoyable, and I will never regret that.

It would be great to see some young medical researcher come up with a quick and inexpensive method of dissolving arthritis deposits on our joints. I would be right up there in the front of that line! I expect that is very unlikely too.

My Dad and my Uncle Jim got me started in the outdoors, and the countless days I have spent out there have given me many of the greatest moments of pure joy in my life. I hope that I was able to let them know just how important those times were while they were still here beside me. I can feel their presence as I watch the late afternoon sunlight glint upon the water.

I am waiting and looking ahead to a new season upon bright water, about to begin flirting with my twilight years. I plan to put that self-made fly rod to work on many a spring afternoon, to feel it arch with the throb of life on a misty summer morning and walk with me at riverside as this next season comes to a close.

It is Thursday the 29th on January, and it is ten below here in Crooked Eddy. My old furnace burns steadily, though it’s heat seems to flee this old house faster than the pipes can carry it throughout. I shivered when I came down to the living room this morning, finding a crisp 56 degrees with the thermostat set at 72.

There are some summer mornings upon our tailwaters which boast that same crispness to the morning air; summer mornings like the one pictured above.

My thoughts are running to summer and terrestrials once more, and perhaps some new patterns will take shape on my vice later on. At least, if this tackle room warms up at all…

Reading back through Ed Koch and Harry Steeves book recently, I was reminded that my summer fly boxes tend to neglect the linear, and less rotund members of the beetle clan, so effective has been my plump little Grizzly Beetle. I vowed to remedy that oversight and set about it with a blanket around my knees. Yes, it is still quite cold, even with bright winter sunshine spilling through the window above my tying bench.

I stopped just short of a dozen flies, all with the long, narrow bodies required to balance out my summer selection. Most bear my old favorite peacock herl bodies, spun in a dubbing loop to form a full, sturdy herl chenille. Some brown, more of them basic black which serves as the foundation color. Beetles tend to be viewed by hunting trout in silhouette it seems, so I offer color variations more often on their bottoms than their tops.

With our hatches so thin last season, I expected a great deal of terrestrial action. Expected, but not found. I believe the trout spread out a great deal along the rivers and, used to a slower hunting style of summer angling, I failed to cover enough water. One cannot hunt large brown trout in a hurry!

My favorite limestone spring creeks never demanded the exertion of covering water. Stealth was paramount in those intimate environs, and that rule prevails along our wide and open Catskill Rivers, particularly during terrestrial season.

Once spring draws near, I will be sure to put together a small terrestrial box to stash in my vest, for they are not limited to summer fishing. Ants and beetles are available in springtime, something I was reminded of after blanking on a handful of sizeable sippers on a warm, breezy early April day on the Beaver Kill. Nothing I offered from my palette of flies of the season drew the slightest interest from that pod of fish. Sitting on a riverbank boulder after a retreat, I felt something land on my ear. I grabbed and retrieved a size 18 winged ant, a fly I carry during the other “A” month of the dry fly season.

I found a suitable fly deep in a pocket of my vest, but the opportunity had passed once the winds calmed. There were no more rises on that far bank.

The sunshine is beautiful today, though its power fades when it tries to transfer the brightness into warmth. Some of the snow has begun to slip off my house roof, crashing down upon the lower slant roof over my angling sanctuary. The periodic booms keep me alert.

I tied a few more soft hackles this morning and then turned my attention to my new transitional pattern. I have some Hendricksons and March Browns tied and ready for spring, though I decided it was time to work up a version for the Red Quills.

Nature is a funny gal, proven again last April when I was hard pressed to find any of the usually reliable and prolific Hendricksons on the water, the mayfly known as Ephemerella subvaria. Instead, what fishing I had was confined to a few brief emergences of Red Quills, legendarily the same insect, but a size smaller and carrying male equipment for the species.

The smaller size 16 Red Quill variation is somewhat simpler, as I chose not to add soft hackle legs, leaving the movement solely to the CDC puff emergent wing. Darrel Martin’s dry fly hook, adorned with a pheasant tail abdomen and wire rib, can be expected to sit down into the water’s surface layer, bringing more of the CDC fibers into contact with currents. There is in fact no “quill” involved, the red of the partially emerged thorax being dubbed with Hemingway’s “Beaver Dubbing Plus” colored Red Wine. Red Quills have not been an every spring occurrence for me, so I hope enough of them show up to allow a fair trial for the pattern.

Eventually, I am going to have to take this idea forward toward our Green Drake. Though their numbers pale compared to those the trout and I enjoyed a decade ago, they have still poked their heads up from time to time in May or June. I will have to make my own Darrel Martins for that bug!

Though I have a great deal of confidence in the general design of these new transitionals, the Drake can be nearly impossible to solve in those years when the hatch comes during very low water. In 2024 there were enough to urge some of our larger brown trout to partake, though extremely low flows in late May kept them resigned to eating only the big swimming nymphs. Last season brought lighter numbers and even lower flows. I took a single heavy brownie with a 100-Year Drake, the only fish I observed that took a live dun on the surface.

“Flies without wings are often very killing, and some that I have tried with a soft feather twisted in front of the cock’s hackle have done good work. I got the idea first from a fly that was sent to me from England.” …”They are not pretty, but give an impression of life in the water.” Theodore Gordon, Forest & Stream, March 28, 1903

I wait for sunlight to breach the gray dawn… Some fourteen inches of fresh snow awaits my efforts to clear a path to the world. I will soon venture forth to begin the toil…

While that snow fell, I sat down with Gordon’s Notes and Letters finding the answer I sought early in the historic volume. So, Halford did include at least one of the soft hackled dry flies in his missal to the father of Catskill fly tying! I can understand why Gordon tied and fished the style, for he understood how necessary the image of life was to how the new German browns perceived his flies back in 1890.

Two hours, shoveling, sweeping and piling, and at last the vehicle is free. The plow left a three-foot-high furrow behind it, which took no little effort to remove. I worked slowly, ever conscious of the rapid beating of my heart. I lost a friend years ago, shoveling too much snow back in Chambersburg. I hope you have good fishing ever after Jan!

The snow still falls of course, and I am thankful that this morning’s installments have been light. It was fun winding the hackles around that quill bodied fly yesterday, as I hope to see it’s mayfly on the water some seventy days hence. In the Golden Age they called it Iron fraudator, though in my generation the entomologists have decreed it to be Epeorus pleuralis. Since the fly emerges near the bottom of the stream, the winged dun swimming to the surface, it seems this soft hackled dry fly might be particularly suited, that extra movement enticing an interested trout.

I tied mine tailed with the soft, barred fibers of the wood duck’s flank, with the coot’s covert feathers’ fibers longer than the dark medium dun cock’s hackle’s. Picturing the fly struggling in the current, well set down into the film and froth brings a smile. I think old Teddy would smile too.

There is no denying the influence of the British on my pursued passion of fishing the dry fly. Despite various mentions both here and in England of casting common wet flies which were taken upon the surface before sinking, there are British patterns specifically designed to float which were tied and known as early as 1850, and likely earlier.

Much of our American development of dry fly fishing practices occurred here in the Catskill Mountain region and on neighboring waters in northeastern Pennsylvania, beginning near the close of the nineteenth century. We too have our early tales of fishing wet flies dry, but the major developments came as a result of Theodore Gordon and his correspondences with the British dry fly maestro Frederick Halford. Gordon influenced local anglers with his flies, tied in accordance with Halford’s theories and modified per Gordon’s own trials and observations on Catskill rivers. I cannot help but be curious as to whether Theodore Gordon tied and fished any patterns in that older soft hackled dry fly style.

Our best information on Gordon is still John MacDonald’s 1948 collection of his notes, letters, and articles published in England’s Fishing Gazette and some early American sporting journals. “The Complete Fly Fisherman, The Notes and Letters of Theodore Gordon” is an interesting book, one I have read twice to date, and it gives us our best glimpse of one of our true fly fishing icons. I have no recollection of any mention of the combination of stiff cock’s hackle and softer gamebird hackles to collar a fly to be fished upon the surface. It will take another reading and a search to see if there is something included which memory fails to recall.

Recently, I wrote about an excellent article on this soft hackle style of dry fly sent to me by a friend. The author found a number of patterns of this style published by Frederick Halford in his listing of one hundred best flies. It seems likely that at least one or two of these would have been included in the dozens of sample flies Mr. Halford mailed to Mr. Gordon.

Forty-four degrees worth of brilliant afternoon sunshine and, despite the chill of the westerly wind gusts, I could not resist!

Though it is not the deep heat of a summer’s eve, baking the aches and pains of a long day on the river from my neck and shoulders, this unexpected glow of sunlight felt remarkable. Luckily, my shrunken larder boasted a remaining can of Hidden Springs’ Breakfast Juice, that this impromptu porch sit might follow my Catskill tradition.

The Catskills are in the path of the worst winter storm of the season. We could see a foot of snow fall on Sunday. It was with some surprise that I walked outside to feel real warmth in the sun, for that porch thermometer read barely one degree yesterday after sunrise. Just last week I had wandered along the West Branch, swinging a fly toward hope for the warmer and wetter winter that would be the best gift Nature might offer to our historic trout rivers. The forecasts say, all anglers’ prayers to the Red Gods shall remain unanswered.

Winter, as usual; with no new hope for the seventy-three days ahead.

The snowpack will be beneficial to the rivers, most beneficial if it endures in the highlands, seeping gradually into the aquifers which feed the spring seeps there, the birthplaces of these rivers. This storm may bring twice the snowfall we have seen thus far. We cannot stop it, thus it is best that we hope the aftermath brings temperatures just above freezing to preserve it’s benefits to bright waters.

I ponder the truth of the season, surrendering to the simple fact that we are barely past mid-winter. I have tied flies for spring and for summer, and I have fondled and polished a few cherished bamboo rods. My winter reading progresses, cherishing the classics, and debuting a few new titles, those penned after the 1940’s.

The sun has slipped below the peak of Point Mountain and the temperature is dropping. Memories of warmer days lingered for a moment, but the full knowledge of winter returns. Cold winds are coming, with temperatures which readily defeat the thin walls and old furnace here at Angler’s Rest. My brief fantasy of springtime has retreated with the setting sun.

Oh, how I wish there was a winter classic angling show here in the Catskills! Some event to look forward to during the arduous length of winter, a celebration of classic tackle and books and all the history that winds along the rivers of these mountains. Sadly, though we boast growing ranks of fly fishers, few even know of, much less appreciate these things. Multitudes blindly follow the mantra of catch more fish, without ever knowing why, nor what it is all about.

And so, unto evening I tread…

A turn in my winter reading has me thinking about summer today… Nineteen ninety-four and I am sitting in my Cumberland Valley fly shop talking flies and fishing with Ed Koch and Harrison Steeves. We are all feeling good about their new book “Terrestrials”, a wonderful collaboration between one of the Letort Regulars and one of the new innovators on the fly-tying scene.

Those were truly the good old days, when terrestrial season offered our paramount dry fly fishing along the Falling Spring Branch. Sadly, Ed is no longer with us, and I closed my shop more than two decades ago. I understand that Harry is still going, and I hope he still gets to wet a line in his favorite streams.

Thinking about those days of course has me thinking about tying terrestrial patterns, even with the cold wind blowing across the snowfields here in the Catskills on a fifteen-degree afternoon.

There are bodies and underwings sitting here with glue setting, waiting to be finished into an adult version of my Woodland Hopper, a fly that cannot be expected to have it’s first trial upon bright water until August. The little “baby” version of this fly has enjoyed a couple of seasons of use now and accounted for some terrific browns! Reading Ed and Harry’s reminiscences got me to thinking about the Baby Woodland fly and spurred me to sit down and tie these adults.

There is a lot in that book to digest, and it inspires thought about terrestrial flies and fishing just as it did thirty-two summers ago, when the authors sat down with me to tell tales and share smiles.

I would love to be able to sit down with those fine gentleman once more, to laugh about my experiences as a transplanted limestone spring terrestrial fisherman who haunts the big trout waters of the Catskills. Angling is timeless, and the great store of written works that define our history allow us all to look back and savor the same inspiration which motivated and charmed our fellow fly fishers, whether decades or centuries ago.

Drifting softly, they fall to cover the grass just revealed. Flurrying snowflakes driven on the Northwest winds, as the gales which crash across our Great Lakes come to earth in sight of the wide Delaware!

We have come to mid-winter in these Catskill Mountains and lie upon the edge of another deathly chill. The warmest day in ten might just kiss freezing. Not a pleasant thought, as I ponder this moment some eighty days away from the hoped-for dawn of a new dry fly season.

Though we have seen snow for well more than a month, Catskill precipitation still lags with respect to historic norms. Missing the warm rains promised these past two weeks has avoided the rapid melting and floodwaters, seeming at least to let the snow upon the high ridges do some good as it seeps underground, but we are forced to open our hearts and arms to more snowfalls should our rivers find the reserves we need for spring. Praying for snow is a hard thing to ask of a village bound angler.

Perhaps I should be systematic, pawing through the fly boxes now and replenishing the most-used flies as winter meanders across the calendar, but it is more likely I spend the day squeezing the cork of a favorite old rod or tying a few patterns my fancies drift to by chance. In that rod I can feel the quickening of life and the excitement of a long run, it’s bamboo shaft bucking and dancing in the sun. Those new patterns harken to moments from the past, and trout not quite tempted by the best that I could offer.

In time, fishing becomes less about planning and rigid preparation, and more about the impressions of rivers gurgling through the canyons of the mind. It should be so, that the years leave us captivated by the magic hours life has allotted us upon bright water.

We are fortunate here, as the Catskills offer a dry fly season that is longer than winter. The cost for such grace varies with the intensity of the hatches, the snows, the droughts and the floods. Those special days and hours could not be more precious than to an angler cognizant of his own mortality.

Bright rivers wind down through the years, and on to the sea, turning back upon themselves to prolong the journey. Each turn is precious: a turn from sunlight into shade, a turn of thread upon the feathered hook, the turn of the handle of a fine old reel in answer to a chorus of flight.

The window is, well, perhaps ajar, though not clearly open. Still, I know what is coming, and that it will last far longer than I wish it would. Weeks would not surprise me.

I have the rod in it’s ready case, the line has been cleaned and I have remade the leader. The flies are tucked into a single box in the pouch on my waders, the heavy ones which help turn the penetrating power of the cold. That pouch has the spool of 2X tippet, though that is not all. It is also the hope chest, for it holds spools of 4X and 5X for the little cup of dries which also reside there. Layers of insulation are laid out, though one fingerless glove simply refuses to turn up.

After nine, and the morning sun has failed to penetrate the cloud cover. Soon, I hope, for every moment that it radiates upon the West Branch fuels my spirit. Ah, a complete pair of old faithful wool glove liners has been found, the basic, military surplus answer to the fingerless glove issue!

The river is just above freezing as I write, and it’s flow is quite low. There is always hope though, faith in the fact that something that isn’t supposed to happen could. Logical thought tells me that any trout that felt the stirrings of hunger felt them days ago when that temperature kissed thirty-eight degrees for a couple of hours before dark. Hope tells me that there could be one who didn’t find and catch a meal to last until the next warm spell, one who just might open his mouth should my Dazed Dace flutter right past his neb…

Nine thirty-five, and there’s that sunshine…