I set to work this morning, one with a clear task ahead. I tied a dozen flies, particular patterns for that special little preparedness fly box for the beginning of the dry fly season. I know my season will not begin when I hoped and anticipated, for if that would be true, I would already have been out wandering a river.
Of course, Nature and her Red Gods will determine when that first hint of the angler’s season shall debut, as it has ever been and shall ever be. My own dealings apart with life I accept that my angling season shall be later than Nature’s caprices decree for the whole group of Catskill anglers. I do hope fervently that my season shall begin, and I have concentrated toward my own preparations, something I can control.
The preparedness box will not be stocked with Gordon’s Quills and Hendricksons, for there are some hundreds of patterns waiting in a pair of Wheatleys. No, this one will include the flies I do not expect to need.
The first half dozen tied this morning have been the summer’s delights, the ants: color black, size 18, split the group half standard and winged. Why? An early April pod of sizeable trout sipping something I could not see, refusing every fly of the season during the forty-five or so minutes they fed busily. I found the answer, sitting fifty yards away on a boulder mulling my failure, when one of their number landed upon my ear!
A pair of early black stoneflies came from the vise next. Ever valuable on my more southerly waters for decades, I have yet to see a Catskill trout take a one, not even when they are buzzing furiously half an inch above the surface. March’s water is far too cold! The day I find myself with not one of those stoneflies in my vest will certainly be the day when every Catskill trout I encounter will finally crave them, and be damned the thermometer!
There have various seasons when I have found good brown trout ignoring Hendricksons to take the nearly invisible tiny black caddis drifting surreptitiously down the current. I have neither seen a bona fide take to one of those tiny black caddis since my retirement, so a few patterns are another necessity in that preparedness box.
My old friend and mentor, Ed Shenk taught me to always carry a few sulfur mayflies every month of the year I visited the hallowed Letort. Such things can happen, and will say the Red Gods if the angler marches forth unprepared. Perhaps I should place a pair of sulfurs in that box too, no matter many miles I am distant from the fair Letort.
Bright Waters Catskill 