There’s no doubt that a nice wild trout on the line and a bit of warm sunshine can do a lot of good toward driving the winter blues away. In general, this has been a mild winter, but winter it is regardless. Sixty days remain until what we hold as the angler’s spring is slated to begin, that magical time of year when the dry fly comes into it’s own.
The joy of Tuesday’s heavily arching cane rod was bolstered by a few moments of real warmth yesterday afternoon, relaxing on the porch with a cold draught. Fifty-two degrees feels more like 80 in February! In truth, yesterday turned out much better than predicted, and I could have spirited away to the river again.
The improvement in my mood got me working on flies, as I decided it would be a good day to whip out a dozen or two of my favorite caddis. The Shad Flies tend to be very popular with our wild trout!
There were sulfurs before the caddis, and today a few Conovers and Catskill Adams; a bit of fun rounding out the spring boxes. The Fly Tyers Guild crew will be at it again tonight at seven, for another installment of what has become our weekly Zoom tying session. JA championed the idea, and it has been well received, with a floating group of about twenty members tuning in.
Tonight, we will tie those Conovers I practiced on this morning. It is a venerable old Catskill pattern that has been found in the Dette shop since 1934, when they started tying the pattern for Scotty Conover of the Brooklyn Flyfishers, the fly’s originator. I had blended some dubbing I ran across the other day. I looked the pattern up in the late Eric Leiser’s charming book “The Dettes: A Catskill Legend” and felt my old blend was a bit darker than ideal, so I added some more gray muskrat underfur to bring it to the “heathery gray claret” described by Winne Dette in the text.
Our second fly for the evening will be Art Flick’s Dun Variant, a pattern that will necessitate my picking a few feathers from my Rhode Island Red rooster cape, stripping the barbs, and soaking the quills after dinner, so they will be ready to go. I have the perfect dark dun hackle close at hand. It is a lovely old fly to fish when isonychia mayflies are on the water.
I have been hoping tomorrow might develop into another fishing day, but the sunshine originally promised has been exchanged for winds between 15 and 25 miles per hour “with higher gusts possible”. Not the kind of day it is advisable to be out trying to cast a tungsten bead weighted streamer like the Dazed Dace. There are always some more flies to be tied though, and my size 11 and 13 North Country fly hooks should arrive within the hour…
Bright Waters Catskill 