Terrestrials?

It is Thursday the 29th on January, and it is ten below here in Crooked Eddy. My old furnace burns steadily, though it’s heat seems to flee this old house faster than the pipes can carry it throughout. I shivered when I came down to the living room this morning, finding a crisp 56 degrees with the thermostat set at 72.

There are some summer mornings upon our tailwaters which boast that same crispness to the morning air; summer mornings like the one pictured above.

My thoughts are running to summer and terrestrials once more, and perhaps some new patterns will take shape on my vice later on. At least, if this tackle room warms up at all…

Reading back through Ed Koch and Harry Steeves book recently, I was reminded that my summer fly boxes tend to neglect the linear, and less rotund members of the beetle clan, so effective has been my plump little Grizzly Beetle. I vowed to remedy that oversight and set about it with a blanket around my knees. Yes, it is still quite cold, even with bright winter sunshine spilling through the window above my tying bench.

I stopped just short of a dozen flies, all with the long, narrow bodies required to balance out my summer selection. Most bear my old favorite peacock herl bodies, spun in a dubbing loop to form a full, sturdy herl chenille. Some brown, more of them basic black which serves as the foundation color. Beetles tend to be viewed by hunting trout in silhouette it seems, so I offer color variations more often on their bottoms than their tops.

With our hatches so thin last season, I expected a great deal of terrestrial action. Expected, but not found. I believe the trout spread out a great deal along the rivers and, used to a slower hunting style of summer angling, I failed to cover enough water. One cannot hunt large brown trout in a hurry!

My favorite limestone spring creeks never demanded the exertion of covering water. Stealth was paramount in those intimate environs, and that rule prevails along our wide and open Catskill Rivers, particularly during terrestrial season.

Once spring draws near, I will be sure to put together a small terrestrial box to stash in my vest, for they are not limited to summer fishing. Ants and beetles are available in springtime, something I was reminded of after blanking on a handful of sizeable sippers on a warm, breezy early April day on the Beaver Kill. Nothing I offered from my palette of flies of the season drew the slightest interest from that pod of fish. Sitting on a riverbank boulder after a retreat, I felt something land on my ear. I grabbed and retrieved a size 18 winged ant, a fly I carry during the other “A” month of the dry fly season.

I found a suitable fly deep in a pocket of my vest, but the opportunity had passed once the winds calmed. There were no more rises on that far bank.