Druthers

Pre-dawn, three days before deer season, and it is 24 degrees here in Crooked Eddy. Cathy and I took a river walk yesterday afternoon, gazing at rock formations we’ve never seen before, rock formations that are supposed to be covered by water. There is no stream gage here, at the bottom of the East Branch Delaware River, but the gage at Fishs Eddy shows a flow of 184 cfs this morning. To put that in perspective, the low recorded flow for this date was 197 cfs in 1974, and the median is 807 cfs. We have very little water in the Catskill rivers.

My Sweetgrass rod came home from Montana yesterday, fully repaired with a new tip section. Of course, I wanted desperately to take it out on the river and fish it a little, but that was as far from being realized as possible. The reaches of water I frequent at this time of year, given a warmish afternoon and a gentle wind, are in desperate shape. Walking out to mid-river I’d be lucky to get the toes of my boots wet. The trout are up against it as winter keeps knocking, and I am not about to trot out there and make their situation any worse.

Sad to say, that Sweetgrass pent will have to sit in the rod rack, swaddled in its bag and tube for six months or so, and it’s stretch of idle time could be longer than that. The Sweetgrass is a summer rod, an eight-foot four weight conceived by me and designed and built by Jerry Kustich and Glenn Brackett to dance through my favorite season on these Catskill rivers.

You all remember 2020 right, Coronavirus lockdowns, events of all descriptions cancelled, an aura of doom worldwide? My Sweetgrass pent was borne as an act of defiance to all of that. Jerry and I passed some emails back and forth that summer, and he designed a taper for an eight-foot four weight pentagonal rod I envisioned to combine distance, delicacy and fish fighting power. That was a truly monumental ask, but hey, it was easy to think of such a reach for the stars to avoid contemplating the end of the world.

Jerry came through, and Glenn took that exceptional rod blank and finished it into a truly gorgeous bamboo fly rod. In the very first hour that I waded a Catskill river with that rod in hand, I stalked, hooked and landed three wild brown trout from nineteen to twenty-two inches. That kind of mojo is special, and it makes me smile when I think about that, and how it has continued.

Right now, summer is a long way off. Walking along the river yesterday with the cold wind blowing in our faces, all thoughts were of winter, and we are technically still two days short of mid-November. By the calendar, that is only about two thirds of the way through autumn.

It seems unlikely that there will be much opportunity for winter fishing. There won’t be any release flows from the Delaware tailwaters, unless you count the high, muddy water running down the West Branch to meet the Montague, NJ flow target while this drought persists. Tailwater releases are cold, but not as cold as the general river water in December, January and February. The couple of extra degrees of water temperature can make it worthwhile to swing a fly for a few hours on one of those rare sunny and warmer mid-winter days.

I have already hung up my waders. I like to give the trout a break when they have their spawning season, and they have extra challenges this year due to the drought. The thin flows create more difficulties for them, leaving them unable to ascend the spawning tributaries, much more vulnerable to predators, and just plain nervous, however a trout processes that. The whole scenario creates an extra challenge for me too, for a couple of warmer, sunny days flanking a moderate overnight low might just push the water temperature up enough to make me fantasize about rising trout again. That is a difficult thing to resist when you are staring at six months of winter.