Halloween

I used to look forward to this holiday. As a bowhunter, Halloween brought the best time of the season for crossing paths with a big whitetail buck! I can still recall the details of some of those encounters, though there has never been that dreamed of mount of a Pope & Young whitetail on my wall to spur those memories. A decent hunter, but never lucky.

It has been a decade I guess since I last entered the forest with a bow and arrows. My chosen stick and string come October is a fly rod, line and leader, my arrow the dry fly.

Halloween pretty firmly marks the end of the dry fly season. In that sense, it brings a sense of loss after seven months of casting flies to shy wild trout.

Depending upon whose word one trusts, our region achieved a record temperature yesterday and could well scale that height again today. The warm air and sunshine will warm the flowing waters once more, giving hope to lost souls like mine that a good trout might just rise to our fly.

Thoughts of the whitetail rut which once captivated me at this season will be far away as I wade shallow waters, searching for a trout concerned more with a fluttering meal than a spawning tributary. I found a trout like that a couple of seasons past, but that was a year with much better river flows. This October has given the Catskill watersheds less than an inch of rainfall. Our annual average for the month is better than four inches.

Here upon November’s doorstep, our ten-day forecast predicts a total of some three-tenths of an inch of rain over the period. Even if we got all of that at once it would be far too little. Spread out over several days it is nothing.

I may find a good trout on the feed, though my focus will be on enjoying this one last day of warmth and solitude before winter finds her way into these mountains. As much as I will cherish this day, I would gladly trade it for a day long rain.