Two Days In May

For the prime time of May, fishing has been a bit slow of late, so when my friend Andy found a couple of days to spare, I couldn’t offer too much encouragement for him to toss his gear in the truck and make the half day drive to Hancock. I told him about the past week, and that things can change at any moment, finally adding my own personal rule: whenever you can go fishing, you should!

Andy rolled into West Branch Angler right behind me on Monday afternoon, and it didn’t take long for us to uncase the bamboo fly rods. Yes, I have to take much of the responsibility for infecting him with that disease, along with the friend who gave him his first cane rod as a wedding gift. I’m not apologizing for my role for, as I noted two years ago watching him fish his vintage Granger on another Catskill river, bamboo suits him.

I watched his casting with the lovely Sweetgrass pent as we encountered a few rising brown trout at an old haunt of mine. He fell for the 8-foot taper that Jerry Kustich had designed for me back in 2020, a crisp four weight that offers anything you might want when fishing Catskill rivers in summer. Andy loves the rod, and it shows in his fishing. The fine presentation that duped a very nice West Branch brownie early in our little tour of rivers, complimented by the wide smile as the fish took line against the arch of gleaming bamboo, made that crystal clear.

That initial success helped us enjoy our time together even more, as our sparse little parade of mixed mayflies and thus the rising trout vanished rather quickly into the afternoon haze. We headed out for the wide expanse of the Delaware, hoping to find a good evening rise, but though there were some scattered sulfurs and a pair of March Browns drifting past, the trout we encountered played an oft repeated Mainstem role. I expected rainbows, keyed in by their constant movement and the splashy little spurt rises, and told Andy we might have a lot of fun, or a good dose of frustration with these trout. The effort to cash in, to finally put our flies in the spot at least one of those traveling bows was heading toward kept our energy up, though it proved to be unrewarded. Andy did cross paths with one of them near dark, though his celebration looked a lot like a man standing in a river admiring his broken leader. I wasn’t quite so lucky.

We dodged dust and guide boats, meeting in the fly shop parking lot the next morning, bringing back many memories of decades of mornings at West Branch Angler. I had hoped we would find the river uncrowded with our morning start, and though solitude wasn’t in the offing, we found enough room to search for a rise. We each found only one, neither the consistent kind we craved, but gave them some time and plenty of casts, just in case. By Noon, I decided it was time to execute my afternoon plan, the one that came up rather golden as it turned out.

Rather than dealing with more waiting and a paucity of bugs, we fished through three different hatches in the course of a few hours. There were sulfurs on the water when we arrived, and a few soft rises showed nearby. I was still giving my friend the lay of the land when his rod arched with the pull of a big, angry brown trout. “Hey what are you doing, I’m talking here”, I laughed, “you should be paying rapt attention, not catching fish!” I was answered by a grinning “I’m showin’ you up old man” punctuated by the ratcheting scream of his reel. Luckily the “old man” wasn’t the one who forgot his net, and kindly landed the youngster’s brightly colored nineteen-inch wild brownie!

We spread out and got to work, fishing through the sulfur hatch and right into a very nice hatch of Shadlfy caddis. As soon as I exchanged my sulfur for a CDX, I felt the big bend of the Paradigm’s classic progressive action as the result of choosing just the right riseform to cast to. Now my old Hardy rent the air with screams of torment. Ha! Vengeance for the old man! That brown measured a cool 21 inches.

We each landed three hard fighting trout, and missed as many more. When the caddis finally petered out, we looked at one another and Andy said “what do you think”. Before I could answer I spied a flotilla of taller gray wings drifting by – Hendricksons! I had three fish in a row, sipping delicately in shallow water. Neither of the first two tolerated a cast, despite my most gentle presentation. Big fish are not comfortable in inches of water! I dropped my fly further above the last trout in the row, and I guess he must have slipped down beneath it to give it a real close look. The surface parted, his white mouth opened, and I was a split second too quick to raise my rod. Goodbye opportunity for a last taste of Hendricksons!

We waded further, searching for additional risers. Despite of good number of big, juicy Hendricksons drifting down the current, we failed to find a taker to set up on. I was headed toward a devilish lie, one where I hooked and lost the same big trout twice in the same day last season, first when the hook simply pulled free, the second two hours later when a hard pull straightened it. I found no one at home.

Andy spotted a single rise, never repeated, and thus we called our day complete. We were smiling and talking as we waded back to our exit trail, happy and fulfilled for the excitement of the chase which highlighted our afternoon. Until next time, my friend!