As usual, our forecast called for winds and severe thunderstorms, their probability beginning around Noon and escalating from that point. It is 4:45PM as I write this, and I haven’t seen a drop of rain. It’s so hot that the winds actually feel wonderful.
Summer thus far has featured a lot of this same scenario, and we simply adapt as best we can. I was on the river by 6:30 this morning, hunting the fog once more.
The first location I chose to fish featured a definitive lack of action, and as the morning marched on without the sun I expected burning off any of that heavy fog, I decided to walk out and try another place. I found action, but it turned out to be the kind of day the Red Gods savor: hell for the fisherman.
I was fishing this morning with my working man’s 50 DF and it was casting beautifully with a number four weight-forward line. Since it was later in the morning now, I was placing my Adams Grizzly Beetle into every nook and cranny I recognized as capable of harboring a sizeable trout. When I laid the beetle gently down on the very edge of some bank side cover, that lovely spreading ring appeared and the brought the Mills to bear. This trout refused to let me turn him away from the cover. Though the eighty-year-old bamboo strained into a full parabolic curve, he just powered down into that cover, ignoring my pressure. In a second, he cut the tippet on that cover and I was flyless, and of course fishless. I just shook my head, as that was one serious brownie!
I fished on upriver after re-rigging, got myself back into that sweet casting rhythm again and started to fish at a high level once more. There were no takers.
I have been kicking around ideas for a new fly, and things took shape over the weekend. I had done some research last winter to see if there were any forest and woodland species of grasshoppers here in the Catskill region, and I designed a fly to imitate one of those species. The first trial on Monday brought no interest, so I went back to the vise and revised the pattern, tying a smaller, baby woodland hopper more appropriate for early July. The baby was the fly I tied on to fish back down the river.
When big brown trout are hunting a meal, they can be unpredictable. They will move, then linger for something between thirty seconds and thirty minutes in one location. Concentration and stealth are the keys to this kind of trout hunting. The little Woodland Hopper found one of those rest areas it seems, and when I shot the fly long and low into his comfort zone, he sidled up to take a look: there was that sweet ring again. I set up on him firmly and he exploded in a big boil and streaked away from his lair toward the main river channel, while I stripped line to keep up. He turned against my pressure, and the hook just popped free. That’s zero for two if you’re counting, though it was nice to get a take on the new pattern.
I kept working every lie and mass of cover as I waded down, my morning getting shorter with each step. I started to fish the next to last spot with long, soft downstream casts, easing down step by step behind my drift. When I got to the serious heart of the lie, I laid one perfectly above and let her drift. Ring number three, an even bigger explosion, and then the world came apart.
It took me a moment to recover from the shock before I could try to reconstruct the event in my mind. It seems that the trout really blew up when he felt the hook, but once more, it failed to hold. There was a lot of pressure on the rod, as this was one honking big fish. When the hook pulled out the rod recoiled, all forty-five feet of fly line and 15 feet of leader came flying back at me at high speed. The rod tip snapped at the ferrule and slid down the loose fly line. The line, leader and fly were a1l in one ball of tangles, and my fishing was brutally ended in an instant. It took me several minutes to untangle all of that after clipping off the fly.
Red Gods four, Mark nothing.
They do seem to like the Baby Woodland Hopper though…
Bright Waters Catskill 