It has been a beautiful week and a fitting farewell to a splendid Catskill summer. Autumn’s typical cooling trend was turned upside down as our afternoon temperatures soared, flirting with records. The sun warmed my shoulders pleasantly, without the overbearing effect of July.
I have stalked the rivers each day, filling myself with feelings of warmth and the happiness of days well spent to last through the approaching sleep of winter.
As gorgeous as this week has been, I could not tell you that the fishing matched it. As some might say, the fishing was splendid, it was the catching that left much to the angler’s imagination! Bright sun and low clear water do not a dry fly angler’s dreamscape make, but there seems to be something else at work.
Thinking back to last year, I recall the cast, the battle and the landing of my last dry fly trout of 2022. It was late in October and I found her rising subtly with a handful of olive mayflies on the water. She succumbed to the wiles of my 100-Year Dun in size 18, a quiet little fly with a dusky wing of widgeon and a body of olive muskrat fur. Removing the fly in the meshes of my net I noted her tail, worn from digging her redds, yet healed, clearly telling me that her duty for the season had been completed.
With the swift onset of cooler weather and plentiful flows from both rainfall and reservoir releases in September, I believe that many of our brown trout have abandoned their feeding lies and taken to their favored spawning areas. I am always careful wading at this time of year, avoiding any signs of bright gravel or congregations of trout in the riffles, and the pools seem barren of the activity they held in summer. Time to let them rest, to seek the wild rainbows of the Delaware as the rain falls and temperatures plummet.
A good friend is headed north to explore the salmon rivers of the Maritimes, and I need to visit him today and wish him Godspeed and arching rods. Oft I have dreamed of such a journey! There is an old Orvis Battenkill cane rod back there in the rack, waiting, and a Hardy Zenith loaded with two hundred yards of backing and an eight-weight floating line…
Bright Waters Catskill 