A Summer Walk

I took a chance on summer’s final fishing day, traveling to the Neversink River with hope in my heart.

I had visited only once this season, finding the summer flow meager at best, and trout absent from familiar reaches. The flow has since been increased, and I thought I owed the river the opportunity to redeem herself in my eyes.

The day was bright, comfortably warm, and carried a surprise – wind! Gusty breezes frequented my old haunts carrying the promise of a feast of terrestrials. I hunted carefully, despite the lack of even subtle hidden rises.

There has been development here in the years since I first visited, and I expect a few more trout may have been released into new residents’ kitchens than the law allows. Whatever the reason, I have found fewer trout in these environs in recent seasons, where once I discovered a quiet bounty.

As I fished along the little run with its overhanging grasses, my heart quickened with memories.

It was springtime when I first approached from downstream, creeping right up to the lip where the current gathered and then spilled into a wide, shallow riffle. The pooled water just above that lip had three trout rising, plucking Hendrickson duns from the surface. I cast as delicately as I could and my dun was taken by a large, vigorous wild brown trout. Landing him, I was breathless to find his brethren still rose.

I caught all three that afternoon, that first one the largest and better than twenty inches, his fellows not far behind. Quite the introduction to this unassuming little run of water!

As I moved on to the tail of the Victory Pool, memories came freely. I found a good trout there at last, his belly tight to a flat rock on the bottom, almost asleep. He had ignored all of my presentations as he ignored the fruits of Nature’s larder delivered by the winds.

I fished on through the pool, covering all of the hides, the shaded edges, the pockets below each rock, but there was nothing but the silence of my casting and the brush of the breeze to break the trance. At the top I recalled a very special day there.

It was my first Catskill trip of the season a decade ago, a longed-for occasion in a late, timid spring. The day itself was everything I had been waiting for: sunny, warm, gentle and beautiful, and I had high hopes for a hatch of Hendricksons. I sat down on the warm, green grass to watch the pool, stretching back and nearly napping with the pure pleasure of it. A sound came to my ear, a gentle plop that brought me upright immediately.

The current parted above a huge rock outcropping in midriver, and the first things I saw there were wings! Blue quills had begun to emerge and struggled to dry their wings and escape the surface. A soft, slow bulge interrupted those struggles, and the mayfly disappeared.

I slid gently off the grassy bank and planted my feet on the gravel, then pulled line from the Hardy Perfect reel. I carried my first vintage bamboo rod, a Wright & McGill Granger Victory, as I began to approach into casting position. By the time I was ready, the first Hendrickson emerged wriggling in the crease of current above the tip of the rocks. The Blue Quill was ready, and I cast it, watching the drift as it bobbed along that subtle seam between smooth flow and upwelling.

Another bulge, and a Hendrickson ceased its struggles. I retrieved my line, clipped that blue quill, and knotted one of the Hendrickson emergers I had tied back in February as my new Granger rested nearby. The rod was older than I, but straight and smooth casting when I sent that Hendrickson on it’s quest, and the arc it described after the bulge and lift was epic! That trout battled hard, ever running back to that sunken outcropping to rid himself of my fraud. In the net he was gorgeous, besting the twenty-inch mark on my tape! That old brownie started me down the long and wonderfully winding road of vintage bamboo and trophy trout!

I savored that memory as I walked slowly downriver, smiling at that grassy bank and the midriver outcropping, on my last summer day on the water. Memories accompanied me rather than energetic trout and the music of a singing Hardy reel, but my feelings were of contentment, not remorse.

It has been a difficult summer, the longest and hottest dry spell of my Catskill memory, my own summer style of fishing interrupted by a July flood and the City’s September drawdown, neither of which brought improvement to the fishing. This season has offered it’s own special gifts, as each season does, and I shall not hold it’s memories in lesser esteem.

What shall autumn bring? I have high hopes, for they are stirred by each new season in a sportsman’s life. I’ll walk the forest thickets on frosty mornings searching for the elusive Mr. Ruff, and angle away the golden afternoons with my hand gripping the scarred cork of vintage cane. What shall I find? Promise and contentment amid cool mountains and bright water of course.