December

The calendar has turned once again, and I have meandered about the house, taken a few river walks, read a few books acquired over the course of the season. The rivers call me now, as the morning begins to betray the day’s gift of sunshine, and I ponder the chance to wade strong current again for a few hours.

The warmer days have been wet, tired and gloomy, so the sunshine is not a gift to take lightly.

Other than within the world of my reading, I have thought little of fishing, still tearing myself away from the throes of season’s passing. This was always a gentler time during the Cumberland Valley years, for I knew that my fishing would continue through winter. There might be hiatuses, yes, when a series of cold fronts poured over the mountains there might be a week or two when the bare trees rattled with ice and wind, but the normal weather days still invited visits to the limestone springs.

Sunlight was always the key to winter thrills there, for it activated the water weeds and their oxygen spurred activity among the food chain. On any winter day a visit to the stream might reveal the soft ring of a rise. A quick adjustment to leader and tippet to offer a midge or tiny olive before opportunity evaporated in the sparkling winter air, this was the task of the winter angler in the limestone country. The reward might be a hefty brown or rainbow as eager to take advantage of the surface opportunities as I!

I brought the dream of winter dry flies north with me when I retired. I have learned that it may live only in memory amid the grand beauty of our Catskill rivers. I still cling to a vestige of hope, shunning logic and experience. All it takes is one rise! The closest I have come was an afternoon in the beginning of spring, the 27th of March, as I watched a handful of little olive duns bouncing down a Delaware pool. The rise came, I quickly knotted a fly, and my devotion was rewarded. That foot long brown trout ignited my season, though weeks would pass before I would find a second riseform on the surface of any Catskill river.

The sun has spread over the ridges to the southeast now, and there is a pleasant glow in the small windows in my tying den. My thoughts drift to the rivers, still high from this week’s rain. It is twenty degrees in Crooked Eddy.