Porch Sitting and Reflecting

My thermometer speaks: it is 82 degrees here just before five o’clock, yet the rain clouds (I hope!) have turned it into a very comfortable afternoon here in Crooked Eddy. I spent several hours on the West Branch, enjoying and reflecting on the challenge of the summer sulfur hatch.

I carried that lovely old Mill’s Standard today. The rod prefers a four-weight line after it’s eighty years or so on the rivers of this earth, and it is spry and as sweet casting a fly rod as one could ask for. My friend, Catskill Master Rodmaker Dennis Menscer restored that rod a few years ago. When he showed it to me, I had to have it, and hell, it was my birthday anyway.

I slipped into the flow and walked gently across the river. With a release of just about 500 cfs, this is low water in my experience, and those who wish to catch a nice brownie had better move gently. So many fishermen slosh around and scare every trout in the reach before they walk fifty feet.

There were three guys down along the lower part of the riverbank, but the upper area was free. Happily, after my careful approach, a trout rose ahead of me. I adjusted my target spot, careful not to walk straight at him. I should have cut off my Trout Bug and knotted a small sulfur 100-Year Dun, but I cast what I brung. No business, and no more rises.

I had seen a careful little sip back on the bank in the rather spare amount of shade there, considering it wasn’t long past eleven o’clock, and started in that direction. A nice fish in the passing sunlight in front of me stopped me in my tracks, and it didn’t need more than two or three casts to find his attention.

That sweet tempered old vintage bamboo laid my size 18 100-Year Dun without a whisper and he couldn’t resist. Old cane bends brother! It played that fine brownie perfectly, taking it’s time, as older gentlemen expect to do. Laid in my net, he measured nineteen inches, and this older gentleman was quite pleased.

There was a good sulfur hatch during the afternoon, but the fishing proved difficult. I hadn’t planned on tiny size 20 sulfurs this early in the summer, and the low water had them taking in the film, and others dining on rising nymphs. That eventually became the reflecting portion of my afternoon.

It occurred to me that I have fished this pool on the West Branch Delaware River for something on the order of twenty-five years. Back in those traveling days, the Fourth of July holiday was my last Catskill trip for the season. Flows were higher in those days, once the hot weather arrived in earnest, and the cold water required insulation under your waders. It also surrendered millions of sulfur mayflies thanks to that 48-degree river water in July.

Larry ran the fly shop at West Branch Angler back then, and he put me on to the Barking Dog. There was no boat ramp or big riverside parking lot, just a little gravel area enough to park three or four cars and a two-hundred-yard walk through the field to the riverbank. Ninety-nine percent of the fishermen weren’t willing to make that walk back then, particularly in waders in ninety-degree sun. Hard to imagine, but if I encountered another angler in that pool or the run upstream, I was shocked at the crowding. For a guy more than happy to take that walk like I was, it was Shangri-La.

Trout would line up along both riverbanks and rise to those sulfurs, big trout. The real crowds and the drift boats and the riverside parking lot changed all of that. You just don’t see the numbers of the big browns you used to see in that pool. The fishing held up to an astonishing amount of pressure, but low water, bad winters with sub-minimal releases and the unslaked barrage of boat traffic proved too much. Fishermen just loved that old Dog to death.

I recall catching many wild browns in excess of twenty inches, taking several that size on a number of days, for many of my twenty-five years fishin’ the Dog. Two of those browns measured twenty-five inches, both taken on size 18 and 20 sulfur dry flies and bamboo fly rods!

I think back at my homecoming last July fourth. I fished a fifty plus year old Leonard rod amid a zoo of holiday river visitors: kayaks, canoes, drift boats, wading anglers and one beat up aluminum rowboat. Amazingly, the particular reach of the riverbank I wanted to fish was vacant.

I worked a good trout, but he constantly moved side to side, taking a sulfur here and there in a wide path. Of course, he always rose on the other side of that path I cast my fly down. Finally, fighting the glare and my aging eyesight, I tied on a size 20 100-Year Dun. The fish had dropped down after a boat passed, but he rose again after a few minutes. I made a long, long cast, checked the tip and dropped the fly just above him. He took it cleanly on the first cast in his new lie!

That fellow gave me a hell of a ride, spinning my old Hardy LRH and showing me my backing a couple of times. When I lined him up in the measure net, I read twenty-one inches, a beautiful broad-shouldered brownie! Thinking now, I cannot help but wonder if that homecoming was a goodbye. I found a construction site when I drove down the lane to The Dog today. Seems the State is building a huge new gravel parking lot, welcoming more boats and more crowds. They seem to miss the fact that this is supposed to be a trout river, not a circus.