The first snowstorm of winter is squaring up the Catskill Mountains for it’s Eastern swing and my thoughts have turned to a couple of decades of late May memories. That of course marks the season of the Green Drake, mythical behemoth of Eastern Mayflies, when anglers’ excitement rises with the trout they seek.
While I dabbled with the hatch a time or two early in my journey, it has been two dozen years since the obsession took firm hold. Spending Memorial Day in the Catskills quickly proved insufficient, and I learned soon enough that a week wasn’t enough either. Eventually I settled upon a fortnight centered on the transition from May to June, still wanting to spend every day of the season here, upon the rivers of my heart.
I was fortunate to have some very good years.
That first dozen years passed in a blur! Hatches were heavy except in the flood year, and I counted hours wrapped in the perfection of the hunt. Sitting on sunlit patches of riverbank, I whiled away the afternoons, rising and stalking the site of each erupting geyser which marked a big trout’s lie. The wild browns gave no quarter and demanded patience and dedication.
Patterns flowed from my vise during those years: CDC comparaduns, emergers, and the 100-Year Drake which proved the best medicine even when the others failed. I tweaked colors, blended wings with flowing CDC puffs and experimented with hackles. During the peak of the madness I dared wish it might go on forever.
There are days that stick in the memory, some like the bone chilling, blustery 45-degree day one May when insanity made me stay on the river despite reason. The flies did come, and the big browns after them, and I caught them when the frigid gusts allowed a good cast and a drag-free drift.
As the years passed, the hatches seemed less reliable, though in hindsight there was always a bit of mystery surrounding them. I recall sitting on a riverbank after a warm, blank afternoon, sipping a beer while I waited for nightfall. No drakes appeared, but a pair of dusk sippers after the sparse little sulfur duns proved to be twin twenty-inchers!
By retirement, when I was blessed at last to spend the entire season on the rivers, the daytime hatches had become as much wish as reality. One year they came on unbelievably, a full month later than twenty years of experience had demonstrated. It seems that may have been a last goodbye.
I have seen a few these past three seasons, though not always enough to entertain a trout to rise. When conditions are perfect, I sometimes find a few opportunities before darkness overtakes the river. That old Payne copy still casts the big dries with authority and throbs with the power of a trophy brown when the Red Gods allow.
I still cling to the memories of all those glorious afternoons and evenings as May wanes and turns to June. I hope the Drakes are still there, down in the silt among the gravel of the rivers of my heart. I hope the great hatches of our greatest mayfly will rebound, that I may feel that old excitement again. I still tie a few new patterns each season…
Bright Waters Catskill 