Zero

Early December, and the temperatures are flirting with zero! A degree or two above or below the mark, depending upon just where you are in the region, lows like this usually have a lot to do with elevation. We are not too high here at Crooked Eddy, just a few comfortable feet above river level, and I have one degree below zero right now, some five minutes after sunrise.

I took my first river walk of the season yesterday afternoon, finding the East Branch Delaware iced bank to bank at the eddy, though flowing beneath the railroad bridge and down past Fireman’s Park. I just checked the brand new USGS Hancock Gage (installed this summer) and water temperature was flatlined at the freezing mark. Flows are low again on all our rivers, something we anglers very much need to change.

If our hatches are going to get the chance to recover, we need a little warmup and some significant rain, soon!

I look at that photo, and I think about the inevitable changes in rivers. The trout is lying on river grass with current flowing through it, and that’s because I took that shot on one of three large grass islands that used to create some interesting fishing up at Stilesville on the West Branch Delaware. The lower island was just opposite the small DEC access area there, while the upper island lay opposite Laurel Bank Farm. We are talking something more than 21 years ago, in June.

Rains had muddied most of the Catskill rivers overnight, and the upper West Branch remained clear and perfectly wadable. There were a few caddisflies about, Psilotreta, the Dark Blue Sedge, and I had the pattern. I stalked an early morning sipping rise along the edge of one of the channels between those grass islands and took that twenty-inch brown on my slate gray X-Caddis. That would be the last time I fished those productive grass islands.

That September, while I was up north again and fishing several rivers, a fellow named Hurricane Ivan came calling on the last day of my trip. When he passed through Deposit, New York, he took those three big, beautiful grass islands with him. He did offer something in return, filling the deep, bouldery wild trout habitat that stretched from mid-river to the westerly bank with pea gravel, making featureless shallows where once giants dwelt.

Mother Nature seemed geared toward violent changes in those years, with three one-hundred-year floods and a five- hundred-year flood coming in the course of two years. Now the changes are subtler. Warmer, drier summers and colder low flow winters are not doing our Catskill rivers any favors, so I hope the tide turns. We have some truly wonderful fly fishing up here, not the shabby put and take mess that so many of our Eastern states offer, but highly challenging fishing for real trophy sized wild trout. The best of dry fly fishing continues here on the waters where it began in America. I for one, would like our next generation, and the generation after that one to be able to say that too!