I don’t know just what possessed me, but I tied a dozen dries this morning. If I made a little pile out of them, that might just be big enough to see!
I had been reading and daydreaming about fishing, and to me that means dry fly fishing. I truly don’t expect to have a chance to use these over the next four months, but perhaps you could call my effort a mission of hope.
Half a dozen of those new flies were Griffiths’ Gnat’s, the old faithful midge pattern, and it would take a lot of thinking to recall the last time I fished midges. I can tell you it wasn’t in the Catskills. It is a little warmer today, though we watched snow blowing around for the past two days, but the water temperatures have continued to drop.
It would be a treat to find a decent trout rising in December, but then again that isn’t very likely to happen. Three weeks of deer season begins Saturday morning and, though I won’t be hunting more than a few of those days, I cannot picture any opportunity for dry fly fishing.
In my seven seasons as a full time Catskill resident angler, the earliest trout I have caught on a dry fly took an olive on the 27th of March. The latest have come during the final week of October. I looked hard for some fishing the first couple of years, out on the tailwaters on many days in January, February and March when the temperatures were above freezing. I did take a couple of fish swinging flies close to the river bottom, but never did I see anything I could even imagine was a rise.
Could it happen in winter? Hell, anything can happen, but I would say that would be about as likely as a flock of wood ducks plucking out their best flank feathers and laying them in a little pile on the bank in front of me.
Bright Waters Catskill 