Just as an update for those interested in fly tying. I made a few tying videos about 5 years ago that were included in certain blog posts. I am no film maker, and don’t own a video camera per se. These were intended to show just how I tie some of the original patterns that I have written about here over the years. These were shot on my 35mm Nikon SLR, so there is no zoom, music or special effects, just an intro to the fly and then a closeup so you can see the tying.

After all of these years, I decided to go ahead and publish them on YouTube. They can be found by searching “Mark Sturtevant fly tying” should any new readers wish to see them. When checking these out, I found there are several guys on YT with the same name, but none appear to be fly tyers so it shouldn’t be too confusing.

I do not expect to set up a special YouTube channel, and I won’t be asking anyone to subscribe. Non-commercial all the way.

It is but the fifth of December, early in the Catskills’ natural onslaught of winter, and it is two degrees here in Crooked Eddy. It was just last week that I wandered the river as the temperature flirted with sixty degrees. Oh, what have we done to reap Nature’s disdain?

Perhaps today I will reorganize my tackle room, vacuum the dust from the heat registers and make room for the small bamboo bookcase said to be arriving next week. My angling library has grown, and though I make periodic donations to the Hancock library, I have been woefully short on shelf space for several years.

It is not new books that stack my shelves. No, my tastes run to tales of the Golden Age, stories of and by those who made much of the history of these Catskill Mountains, and these volumes deserve a place of reverence.

Such frigid cold makes this a good day to ponder, blend a bit of fur and wind the silk to fashion a new pattern, stimulate the hope that the early spring warmth of the New Year will see mayflies struggling in the film as the new sun warms their wing muscles. Hope is paramount when the morning flirts with zero!

I truly hope that Nature will work her magic, and our mayflies will once again appear in plenty on the rivers of my heart. I would miss the challenges of designing new imitations nearly as much as I would stalking a fine trout subtly rising to a drifting dun!

The first winter snowstorm has come to the Catskill Mountains and, in it’s passing, it has taken my hope for further angling during this last month of the year.

My season of fly tying and reading has begun, and there are the enameled quill bodies for three Hendricksons hanging here on my drying rack. Ah those Hendricksons! I tie them each year, and likely during each month of winter, though if those stored in myriad fly and storage boxes should be counted, they likely outnumber all the days I shall be allotted to spend upon bright waters.

These three will receive their wood duck wing, a thorax of my A.I. Hendrickson dubbing blend, and a barred rusty dun hackle from one of Charlie Collins beautiful roosters. Before that though, three more quill bodies will join them in waiting, half a dozen being such a perfect number!

I’ve been blending dubbing lately, my traditional as well as A.I. Hendrickson supplies having been depleted during a season when the tying of those favored flies was far more therapeutic than practical.

When it comes to dry flies, I have last year’s entire store of Gordon Quills and Blue Quills, as well as most of the olives still safe and unruffled in their boxes, for I encountered no hatches of these early season stalwarts whatsoever. Nature may truly perform the miraculous, and I begin the passage of these long months of winter hoping for nothing less.

Might winter grant some brief reprieve along the way, a day or two of unseasonable warmth and sunshine when the spirit soars and stiff legs find their way to the snowy banks of the river? We shall see…

So here we are in December already, month number two of the Catskill Winter of 2025. The first snowstorm of the season is stalking us from the west, and I am here dreaming of fishing…

The little streamer fly pictured above is an old pattern of mine, one I have not tied for a good many seasons. Chances are I still have an old one or two, stashed somewhere in one of a hundred fly boxes, where it would take longer for me to find them than it did to tie a few new ones. I don’t fish streamers much anymore, the dry fly having fully captured my heart and mind, except as an unusual respite from winter.

JA was talking about a new pattern he had devised, one a West Point cadet had used last month to catch a bunch of hungry rainbows. I laughed when he told me of that young man’s banner day, repeating the truth here in the Delaware system that “rainbows don’t hit streamers”. He told me he thought his fly would be a fine choice for my winter swinging, though he has conveniently forgotten to send me a photo or a recipe for it’s construction. Pondering the chances that the weather will cooperate any time this month got me daydreaming about the old Pearl & Squirrel.

Ah, the Falling Spring and her bridges! None of them were large, and that last stone arch was smallest of all! The size of the cover does not command the size of the trout though.

I had crafted that simple little streamer for her shallow waters and the dace minnows who swam there. A tuft of grizzly marabou, braided pearlescent Poly Flash for the body, crowned with a long wing of gray squirrel tail and bearded with a touch of red marabou, the fly was simple and effective. It was vital that the squirrel tail came from my own hunting! For that imbued the flies with a certain mystical power. The spring creek trout respected that power, and they attacked my little dace minnow when swum nearby.

It was an evening long ago when I was abroad on the stream hoping for some sign of the sulfur hatch that once enthralled all who angled the limestone country. After ’94 the flies were scarce, and none appeared that evening, so I had cut back my tippet and knotted a size 10 Pearl & Squirrel for my last moments on the stream. Near the edge of dusk, I cast my fly across the inlet to the arch and let it swing downstream into darkness… twitch… twitch… twitch…

The short rod shuddered, the water thrashed wildly in the bole of the channel, and I found myself engaged in a vicious fight! Whatever leviathan had engulfed my Pearl & Squirrel didn’t wish to give it back, nor did he wish to come out from under that arch! Nearly the entire exchange evolved amid those close quarters. A few times he would streak downstream and I would check him, knowing that all manner of rocks, logs and roots waited there to grant him freedom. Thrice I turned him just abreast of the outlet, where he boiled and thrashed again beneath the darkness of the bridge.

I know that the magic of my patient .22 harvest of that gray squirrel granted me victory that evening, leading the great trout upstream into the open stream channel at dusk, and into my net. The brown was nearly two feet long, wide flanked and heavy, and my hand trembled as I twisted the small fly free of his jaw.

If I close my eyes, I can still feel the rush of that moment, feel my hands shaking in the cold spring water and the chill of evening.