Hunkered Down

There are seventy-five days until I can expect to find that first rising trout of this new season, and winter has taken hold with an iron fist! It is fifteen below zero here in Crooked Eddy.

With our ancient heating system working overtime, it is a balmy 54 degrees in my kitchen. Wearing three shirts and a blanket, I am sitting in front of an impressive little space heater as I write, a truly wise Christmas gift from my friend Mike Saylor. It is difficult now to even dream of springtime.

Spring is a wondrous vision which today seems unbelievably distant, even fantasy. I wish heartily to close my eyes and feel the sunlight on my shoulders as the lithe wand of split bamboo flexes in my hand and the fly drifts down to the curl of the surface.

There are to be certain many colder memories of spring in these Catskills. I can remember and laugh about my sorties for the fabled Hendricksons in the snow. One spring day I was huddled in my fleece on a high bank of the West Branch, my head bowed as the sleet pattered on the hood of my rain jacket. The hatch had begun several days earlier, and I had sorted through the immediate necessities of work as quickly as possible and driven north. There would be no Hendricksons that day, no rises, not even a bump to a subsurface drift once all else seemed lost.

There does seem most often to be a pattern to these Catskill springs. One chilly, cloud drenched breezy day there will at last appear some tiny grayish vision after hours of staring at the water. Wings! They may be Blue Quills or Quill Gordons, though they will invariably be few. On rare occasions, one rise will be seen to greet those first few flies. Nature’s flies will be joined by my own, my fevered casting serving to bring some warmth back to my shivering frame, naught else.

It may be the next day or the day after when another little flurry of hatching flies will cause a second rise, and a third. Eventually my fly will arrive above the nose of an interested brownie and the season will begin.

There will follow a handful of days with increasing prospects. Brief little hatches will struggle off, a few trout may be caught, and eventually the afternoons will begin to warm and usher in the first good hatch of the year. The first of the larger brown trout will show themselves and indeed one may come to hand. Then will come a hard cold front, with temperatures dropping, the winds howling and the all important water temperatures abandoning all of those insects who had begun to hatch and those trout which had begun to feed. The effects of this front may last from two days to a week, while anglers shiver once more and pay penance for those first few trout of the season.

There is light outdoors now, though it brings no warmth so short a time past sunrise. In truth, these may be the coldest hours of the day. There is still beauty in the tinge of filtered sunlight as it touches the tops of the trees on the high point of the northeast ridge. Welcome to Hancock, winter sun, deliver us on toward spring!