It is a cold, damp, dreary April day in the Catskills, a very typical early spring day this time of year. Reservoirs are spilling in the Delaware watershed and the rivers are high and rising, and I am smiling. I cannot help but send my wishes to the Red Gods to maintain the status quo, for no matter the conditions might improve, I will not be along any of my favorite reaches of riverbank when Day Zero arrives on Monday.

As years flow downstream and seasons pass into memory, I find each spring, each dry fly season, and even each hour along bright water to become more precious. Those of us who can count our time along rivers in decades are quite aware of the unmistakable truth: there are fewer of those precious moments ahead than lie before.

There is a simple black aluminum fly box that has been filling with new patterns during these months of winter. New ideas, fresh thinking, flies I cannot wait to cast upon these Catskill rivers are waiting there. Despite the questions brought of droughts and hard winters, the magic and promise of the season just ahead sparkles. The promise lies just out of reach, still unattainable.

I cannot help myself from checking river gages and weather patterns. This year, the emergence of the season does not rule my fate. Other than the capriciousness of the Red Gods rule.

I saw the familiar pattern once more, the Beaver Kill dropped to kiss that 1,000 cfs threshold which fills my hand with a favorite six weight rod with a Gordon’s Quill knotted fast! Turning to the temperature page I saw the year’s first flirtation, passing the mid-forties. Yesterday’s rain and the river is rising again, and a cold day and night and those temperatures will retreat. I have danced to that tune for seven spring seasons. The grand difference is that I dictated my own terms for those seven years, able to venture forth and assessing the water flowing past my legs.

I find myself wishing for Nature and the Red Gods to delay that precious beginning of the dry fly season as much as possible.

A read through a favorite book, nor the tying of just a few more Hendrickson duns cannot quell the longing for bright water now, as March winds slowly into April.

I feel at ease at this time, sitting on a riverbank, watching the seasons from pass from winter unto spring, seeing it with my eyes and straining each speck of matter bobbing down the currents – is that at last a mayfly? Moving from my easy chair to my desk and back has no cure for my restlessness.

I wound my fingers around that grip and a smile crossed my face. I wasn’t standing at last in one of the rivers of my heart, though not within a hundred yards from bright waters, just standing in the yard, a double tapered line strung through those guides for the first time in months. The breeze held a chill despite the sunshine, but the motions of those first casts warmed the blood in that left arm, and the smile remained.

There was a question in the corner of my mind since I wrote the last words of my January column for the Catskill Fly Tyers Guild’s Gazette: just how would my Leonard 66ACM cast with a six-weight line? Feeling better a little every day, I decided to seek the answer.

I placed an LRH wound with a DT5 line in my right pocket and a Princess bearing a DT6 line in the left, and out to the lawn to see what that lithe shaft of vintage bamboo could tell me. The Red Gods as I lofted the first cast, pushing that cold breeze right in my face, felt just like old friends.

The five-weight felt familiar, and very capable to flex the rod cleanly. I tossed a few casts to limber up the house shuttered winter muscles and then traded reels. The Princess bore the same make and model of line, one of the 406 double taper lines. My Leonard rods are well acquainted with the 406 DT lines, performing better than any lines I have tried on all of them. Number six rolled out a longer cast in the face of that breeze, with no trace as over loading the ACM.

The legend of the Leonard ACM rods describes a special-order taper, designed to the desires of championship caster Authur C. Mills, with a heavier butt and a lighter tip. That lighter feel in the tip is clearly telegraphed to my hand, but its quickened enough to handle either line weight. With either line, the rod performs best with a light touch.

The true test to determine which line is my top choice will need time to get the rod on the river. Spending a day fishing through all of the changes the trout and those Red Gods have to challenge me will make that choice crystal clear!

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.

Spring lies so near, and yet so very far away! I have done my best to take the reins, dealt with my present situation, and worked toward a future upon bright water as soon as possible. Time will tell…

So, while I keep my mind focused, I have been reading through an old book on terrestrials, one I had never heard before. I found myself thinking about a class of bugs I honestly never paid much attention to. The more common flies don’t get attention when trout fishing is the subject, and it is easy to ignore several species: houseflies, deer flies and horse flies and their relatives. I decided to do something about that empty compartment in my terrestrial box.

What made me decide to come up with a new general bug to prospect with, whenever I notice any of those naturals? I recalled an unusual day just a couple of seasons ago. I slipped gently into the river one afternoon and found some unexpected hard rises. There were no aquatic insects hatching causing this serious feeding, so I immediately moved to offer some terrestrials. I went through several ace in the hole patterns with none of them interesting even an inspection rise.

Eventually, I succeeded to capture something from the drift. It looked that it might be a bee or Yellow Jacket, but it seemed to stuck together in some other material. I thought looked to be part of a nest. Some pretty strong gusty winds were blowing periodically, so it seemed to me that a nest in a tree may have been disturbed and coming apart. I was stumped to come up a dry fly to look and act enough like what I was seeing floating down to those trout. The event stopped after half an hour and all feeding ceased. That was my first bees in nest hatch, my first in 35 years and likely my last, but it did get me thinking.

Reading that old book made up my mind to design a general-purpose fly. The concept was a fly that could be used as a horsefly, deer fly or a housefly by tying it in a couple of sizes. I wanted something so that a change of color and the addition of a rib would imitate a bee or Yellow Jacket. I decided it to call the Trout Bug.

This pattern will be added to a small, early terrestrial box that will be tucked into my vest when I first fill it up for the beginning of the season. I want these always there. The first half-dozen of Trout Bugs were tied on classic dry fly size 12 hooks, a nice middle of the road size bug. I don’t want to carry of several sizes of these – I want a decent size two-winged some kind of a terrestrial fly that suggests a nice impromptu meal. The Trout Bug fits that bill.

Come summer, and I hope to spend a lot of long wonderful summers along the rivers of my heart, when I find some fine old brownie who isn’t impressed with my usual dry du jour, I will take a shot with one of those Trout Bugs. I think that might just turn the tide my way!

Just enough, glistening, frosted with white to bring the reminder that spring remains but a hope. Heady days, teased while imprisoned I watched, filling my lungs in the warmth air while the sun brought life in my bones, yet naught save watching and dreaming. My soul wishes to rush, embrace the season headlong, but the time is not mine.

My fate is in other hands, my plans belong to others, and my freedom and control has been stripped from me. At best, if the season shrinks for now, I will benefit. Lest I not miss a moment when it comes in due time.

I retreat in decades of golden moments in a blessed angling life.

I am wading the fringes of the West Branch, haunting the riverbank forsaken by the crowds. While the others search in vain for rises in mid-river, I alone find them, delicate, shy, sipping in the shallows, drawn to the smaller, ruddy duns, in the traces between the tossed slabs of rock… wolves!

The rain increases and the river rises steadily. I am working along the edge of a favorite bend, wading carefully lest the heavy flow takes me feet away from me. I am casting a big Isonychia, and the fly must all but touch the vegetation to draw a strike. When I probe successfully the in-between, I am rewarded: the lithe wand bucks with life and power as another brown departs from the edge and dives into the tumult of the rising water!

A morning, decades from the past, and I stalk the meadows of the limestone springs. Ed Shenk has shared the secret to his White Minnow, and I have crafted each from my vice in strict conformance to his instruction.

The seven-foot rod works in such close turns, and the line reaches to place the minnow just so, such that it slips beneath the surface that the current rushes beneath a dark little cavern. Twitched once, then twice, and the rod is alive and nearly taken from my grasp! A tense duel, unseen, until leviathan reveals in the light of day. Subdued, the fly slips easily and I, hands trembling, I guide him back into the silver froth!

Shall a new morning greet me at riverside?

Another milestone has arrived, and yet time still seems to be spiraling. Snow is a promise, and yet just hours from a warm sunlit morning. Turmoil in the heavens, turmoil here in earth.

The Beaver Kill has a fine freshet, to clean it’s gravel free from the old and welcome the new. Shall new life wriggling between those stones seek the sun when April dawns?

I began to fill a fly box tasked for winter’s new crop of patterns, but I soon lost my steam, the task left unfinished. Concentration evades me.

The rods are still cased, and none have dallied in the hand, no polish has buffed the luster behind all the years since untold casts have launched a hope and a prayer. Time stands, circling…

I wish to think forward, to plan for that first cast when a soft ring elicits a quickening in my heart rate, yet the mire pulls me down, prevents my spirit to rise to the light.

Waiting…

I can hear that line over and over, Tom Petty’s signature whine… Yea, it’s hard indeed.

I sat out on the porch yesterday afternoon, once the sun came through the clouds: eighty-four degrees there in my old chair; March in the Catskills. I almost tasted a cold, crisp Cold Snap rolling down my tongue, but that has to wait too. I simply sat there, feeling what felt like an early summer afternoon, watching the whisps of clouds glide over the top of Point Mountain.

I can’t quite to make the usual plans that I would be plotting daily as we are coasting toward mid-March. There are too many pressing things that I have to try to get done.

I’d simply dream back into one of these unseasonably warm days in March, wandering along Big Spring, back before things got so damned complicated. There was a time when I’d stalk along those meadows, watching every inch of the bottom, a shine beside a weed edge, evidence that a big rainbow was lurking…

Of course, the take obviously wasn’t a guarantee, not even with the three-weight I would have along on a winter’s day. One of those insane fish would go berserk if you did get a little hook in his jaw! That shallow, clear water you would just watch those ripping flashes of all those colors and a boiling furrow in the water as it streaked away. They always knew where the next weed bed was, even if the one they wanted was seventy yards away… yea, the one with a cluster of big chunks of limestone in the middle of a big ball of weeds. A trout measured in pounds on a size 20 hook and a 6X tippet, and a prayer!

I thought it was complicated back then, but it wasn’t turned out that way. Funny how your perspective changes.

Back in Crooked Eddy, and that is a comfortable situation. I was just a couple of days away, as one counts the days, but in another sense I was very a long way from home. Lost for a time.

I met a lot of new people, too many I still have a hard time to sort them out and put the names on the faces, but they were very important to me, even some which passed through in a whirlwind. So thank you very from the bottom of my heart dear ladies and gentlemen.

Here has dawned the thirtieth day of my annual countdown, the last few turns along the path to a new dry fly season. Winter is fighting in and out while the new glimpses of spring tries to make a few inroads, between with a few warm, sunny days. There is still snow in front of my doorway, but there is finally some open water flowing along the rivers of my heart.

In a normal year, that last thirty days bring a fair number of soft days which draw me out on the rivers, previews, moments of wandering bright water and testing with a few flies cast and swung and getting to know the feel of the best half of the year. Two thousand twenty-six is going to be different, and there will be some serious challenges to meet along that lost stretch of the road.

I’ve been there before, though there are some new turns along the road. I don’t know anything about the mysteries that I will have to work my way around along the darker turns. I won’t be able to get my boots in even one step in shallow water, and I won’t be able to make even one early cast to prospect the currents, but my heart will wanting that caress of bright waters. I’ll keep that spirit, that dream of closing my hand, squeezing the cork and sending that first cast toward a soft subtle dimple in the surface.

Those dries, today, were Isonychia, Century Duns and a 100-Year Dun on big size 10 hooks. They were fashioned with a hope that I see those big claret-colored mayflies come early June. They have been spotty these last few years, as have many of our mayflies.

The sunshine drew me outside, though I knew it’s shining warmth was a lie. The air still hovers below freezing, though it feels a bit warmer walking in the direct sunlight. Saturday’s thaw was short lived, and I recorded all of seven and a half degrees this morning after sunrise.

I enjoyed my riverwalk, hailing the bald eagle soaring down along the strip of open water along the east bank of the East Branch. I doubt he had found anything fishy along that shoreline, with most of the river still silent under a cap of ice and snow. The snow and ice we have been warned of for the morning won’t make tomorrow’s hunt any better for him, but Wednesday afternoon is boasting of 49 degrees and sunshine, with Thursday just about as warm and bringing nearly three quarters of an inch of rain. The combination just might be enough to break the ice’s hold on our Catskill rivers.

It’s tough to try to hold onto expectations for March, for a few days of mild, sunny weather can tease you into believing spring has sprung, then be followed by snow driven by thirty mile per hour winds.

I look at March as a take what Mother Nature gives you kind of situation. I know I won’t find any dry fly fishing, but there can be a run or two of really nice days when it simply feels great to get out on the water. I can wander riverbanks and swing a Copper Fox, take a slim chance on running into a big, hungry brown.

The slow swing, bumping rocks along the river bottom is an easy way to get my casting muscles into shape. It is comfortable fishing, devoid of any serious expectations. Trout don’t feed much when the water is in the thirty something degree range, but there is always a chance to find one down there poking around because it’s his day.

I’ll take one of my old Orvis’s, or the Steve Kiley eight-footer with a heavy six or seven line. If there’s a stronger flow, a clear intermediate will get the nod, while low flows call for the floater. I don’t need a vest, just a bit of a chest pack, a small box of flies and a spool of 3X tippet. There often aren’t a lot of those days, so I enjoy one when it comes, saving the cold blustery days for drift boat chores, etc.

The ghost in my laptop just popped a tiny snowflake onto the bottom corner of my screen, with a message I don’t want to see: “3 in. of snow Tuesday”. I’d rather that system pass quickly through overnight and let Wednesday’s warmup arrive a day early!

Just maybe I’ll wrap a few Red Quill bodies and then rustle up a Cold Snap while I let their hard lacquered coating dry. Sounds like a plan…