I tallied up my fly-tying log this morning to see exactly what I accomplished this past year. The total, as titled above, came out somewhat below my average retirement production. Perhaps I’m getting old.

It is true that I did log one hundred thirteen days on the water in 2023, though since it is my custom to tie a few flies in the mornings before heading out to the river, that cannot be used as an excuse. One hundred ten dozen is a significant number of flies in any case, particularly for one who no longer ties commercially.

Experimentation and a bit of inventiveness is certainly a factor, as is my interest in the history of trout flies, both leading to the production of a good quantity of patterns. Of course, something on the order of 98 percent of the flies born in my vise are dry flies, for that is squarely where my passions lie.

As far as my winter goals, the Davidson Special is certainly a priority. Mahlon Davidson’s classic, dubbed with fox dyed with willow bark, strikes me as an excellent imitation for the Green Drake. It’s delicacy should be a primary trigger for the most heavily pressured trout of the season. I hope I find enough of those cherished flies upon the water this spring to fish the pattern with confidence!

I have already prepared the various dubbing blends and tied samples for the expansion of my A.I. series, flies inspired by the late John Atherton, so that winter project has been slated as complete. The Translucence Series may receive some adjustment in shade, just to see if I can improve upon their initial effectiveness.

There is another idea lurking in my thoughts, a cross between a 100-Year Dun and a twenty-some year-old pattern I called the CDC Outrigger Dun. Perhaps I should play with that a bit since it has come to mind…

It seems I have whiled away another winter’s morning, savoring the last volume of my cherished Dana Lamb library, beginning a pair of Gordon Quills, and putting down these thoughts. Only ninety-seven more to go…

Welcome to a New Year! January is teasing with the barest dusting of snow at daybreak, just a trace upon the grass, though Point Mountain’s eastern flank brings a smile to the boy still deep inside me.

In truth, there was a glimpse of white up high when I drove over to the rod shop on Saturday, but our village remains in somber grays and muted greens. I miss the snow! December has passed and still the dreary landscape greets my eyes each day. That inner boy is calling, recalling days when schools were closed and sledding made spirits bright!

Mountain snowfall brings more than smiles at their glistening beauty, for they supply the groundwater that charges the springs which feed the rills that become the brooks that nurse the trout waters from which old anglers such as I draw life itself!

The late autumn and winter rains have oft been gentle, and thus good for the rivers, but there is no substitute for the slow drip of a mountain snowpack tight to the bosom of Mother Earth.

I long to walk along the genesis of bright waters, to watch the ice dripping close to the earth, just as I long to wade these rivers of my heart and cast a fly. If it must be winter, then let it be.

I made a visit to my friend Dennis Menscer’s rod shop yesterday, the result of a surprise phone call after breakfast. Though I have been feeling less than energetic, Dennis’ call perked me right up. He was calling to ask if I wished to stop by and pick out the finished blank for my long awaited eight-foot three weight Menscer fly rod!

Now why a three weight bamboo rod you might wonder, and why an eight-footer unsuited for the little Catskill mountain brooks. In truth, I have been thinking about and searching for such a rod for the past four years. During that time, I have cast every rod I could get my hands on, with but one convincing me that it had the attributes I was looking for. Of course, with luck being what it is, that rod was one of a kind and it wasn’t for sale.

In 2019, Dennis had designed and made an eight-foot rod for a two weight line and brought it along to the Catskill Cane Revival in Roscoe. I was enamored of that rod and it’s crisp and effortless casting, though I felt that a two might be too light to regularly handle the outsize trout I stalk each summer. It did not take long for me to start needling my friend about designing a similar wand for a number three line.

Indeed, a four weight will be clasped in my left hand on many a summer’s day, but there are those periods when river flows are scant, and more delicacy becomes warranted. I have made no secret of the fact that I think an eight-foot rod is the perfect foil for stalking the amazing wild trout of these Catskill rivers, thus that need for utmost delicacy meets the utility of the eight-footer and the desire for the power still required to fish fine and far off. A number three fly line, particularly one with a long, gradual taper delivers that ephemeral combination.

Last year, Dennis responded to my constant worrying by telling me that he was designing such a rod. I missed getting my hands on the prototype, as he had a standing order for the first finished rod, but I did get a chance to cast it before it was packed into it’s tube and shipping container. Amazing, I told him, consider my order placed! There is something about a Dennis Menscer rod, a magic born of decades along these Catskill rivers coupled with the deep knowledge gained from countless restorations of vintage rods created by past Catskill masters.

Since that day, I have been hoping that the rod might be finished in time for summer 2024, and now I know that it will be. There is a special little Hardy St. George Junior reel, already spooled with a touch of backing and a new vintage Orvis Spring Creek DT3F fly line patiently waiting in my armoire. That long discontinued line boasts a fifteen-foot taper and my favorite dun gray coloration. It is stealth personified.

Day 99, and rather than thinking of spring, I’ve passed right through and harbor dreams of summer!

And so I have come once more to that old milestone, not yet mid-winter, but with two months of it behind I stand with a real hope for spring in sight. That count of days gives me hope in itself, for as each of those one hundred days is passed, the goal moves closer to realization.

Our Catskill rivers are high, and their waters warmer than they might be, for ours has been a wet and mild December. the Catskill watersheds welcomed an average rainfall more than twice the historical average for the month. Reservoirs draining to the Delaware River are either spilling or have spilled their excess within the last few days. There has been no measurable snowfall here in Crooked Eddy.

The angler’s inquiring mind wonders what this will mean for the coming fishing season, and as always we are left to either theorize or simply guess. Should these next hundred days continue the wet, mild pattern of weather, the fly hatches could begin early. If however the next three months bring diving temperatures and heavy snows, spring fishing would likely be late. The one constant in these annual considerations remain: we must wait and see!

In battling the bronchitis that crept into my days after Thanksgiving, I have failed to take advantage of the warmer days of December. My hunting ceased after the opening day of deer season, and I have not prospected any of our warmer than usual winter rivers. On a second round of medicine, I hope to be able to remedy that situation in the new year.

I would like very much to see the sun again, watch it twinkling upon bright water as I cast a long, slow line down and across the flow. A fifty degree day (we just had a rainy one) with clear, sunny skies might help to lessen my cough, and I am certain that a walk along the river could not fail to do me some good. The rain is still falling on the metal roof above my head though, with a chance of snow lurking in the forecast.

One hundred days from now I will walk along the river bank and greet a new dry fly season, with hope if not fulfillment. I shall search the currents for new signs of life. Whether on that first day, or further on, the season will unfold, and I will see that first pair of gray wings dance upon a riffle, behold that first soft bulge in the current and feel the quickening of my heart as I take the fly from the hook keeper and pull that first measure of line from my reel.

Each season is different, and that seems perhaps the best reason to see as many of them as we can!

The date is buried in time, somewhere more than three decades ago. It was later in the spring as I do recall, and the meadow grasses were closer to calf high as opposed to towering above my head as they would in high summer. I had been called there by an article in a fly-fishing periodical, one simply dedicated to Difficult Trout.

I stooped low as I neared the stream, its sparklingly clear water rushing gently over bright gravel, but it was to no avail. I had just enough of a glimpse for the image to register in my mind; half a dozen trout were finning below a low branch. Before I could think or move they were gone, vanished as if they never had been!

Over several visits, I learned to watch the stream well ahead of my own progress, to crouch and observe before ever thinking of a cast. When fortune smiled, my careful study would reveal a shudder in a patch of watercress, or a subtle movement where the overhanging grass brushed the water’s surface. It was then that I began to catch the brilliantly colored wild rainbows and browns of Falling Spring.

A love affair would blossom, until at last I moved to Chambersburg and opened the fly shop I named to honor her: Falling Spring Outfitters. Those were heady days, highlighted by fishing at each day’s beginning and end, as well as the excitement of taking the risk to live life attuned to my own angling imagination.

My favorite evenings were those in May and June, when the soft orange and yellow sulfurs would draw the limestone trout to the surface. Stalking the water meadows after sunset with a short, light rod and a dainty dry fly, the brevity of the rise and the impending darkness raised the anticipation and excitement to new heights. At times I fished alone, though there were glad evenings when a number of us would gather hopefully, where the tiny stream riffled behind Bill White’s house. We would sit and talk, anglers all, and every once in a while, one of the group would rise and make a few casts when a soft ring twinkled in the twilight.

There are countless memories from those years in the Cumberland Valley including both triumphs and failures with the dry fly, as I worked to solve the mysteries of weed driven currents with a tippet that could hold a trophy brown. There was a huge brownie beneath the stone arch bridge one late summer evening long ago. I tied a tiny streamer then, the Pearl and Squirrel, which tempted him with both its lively sparseness and pearlescent flash. I won that close quarters battle, finally netting a trout well over twenty inches long!

I think back to tricos on summer mornings, visits with Ed Shenk and Ed Koch in the shop, and all the hundreds of dozens of flies I tied there. I remember one warm spring day, when March felt more like May, when my unplanned walk along the stream brought me face to face with a pair of trout I scarcely believed. Fishing had declined by then, and such trophies were no longer seen, much less cast to and caught.

I aimed my back cast through the tree branches behind me, and sent a small Shenk Sculpin to the far bank, then let it swing out into the current where those leviathans lurked. The brown trout I battled finally to my netless hands was 25 inches long, my largest from those bright waters. I can still remember the little CFO screaming as that fish ducked under a log and ran full speed away downstream! To land him was unexpected to say the least, though clearly meant to be.

The Leonard has received its off-season polish, and the old amber cane gleams with a light that belies its nearly seventy years. My smile comes from recollections of special moments with that vintage Catskill classic.

Eight months ago, I began my annual dry fly odyssey with that rod in hand and a freshly tied Gordon’s Quill resting in the hook keeper. How perfect that the historic Catskill combination produced two fine brown trout to usher in a long and beautiful dry fly season.

Throughout the 2022 season, I had been on the losing end of a continuing battle of wits with a very special fish. Hooked and lost twice when he broke my tippet and a third time when the hook unexpectedly pulled out, the most embarrassing episode of the duel came when my autumn fly sailed free of the flawed tippet on my cast, only to alight and drift untethered to be taken by my foe.

On a rainy September afternoon, we dueled once more, and the Leonard proved my successful foil! Heavily muscled and barely shy of two feet long, that brownie fought the old man and his old rod with all his cunning and might.

Rubbing the beeswax and lemon oil concoction along the shaft with my fingers, I could feel both the history and electricity of a truly venerable rod.

Once more, a vintage St. George will take it’s place in the locking reel seat come April, as we embark upon another glorious season. Indeed, one of Father Theodore’s famous namesakes will once more occupy the hook keeper. The pairing brought me luck this year!

I raise my cup and wish you all the best for a very Merry Christmas!

The Cree hackle catches light as I wind it round the base of the canted wing, bringing a smile and remembrances of moments on the water. Another pair of flies completed for a Christmas fly box.

I cannot tell when my friend will travel north; he never comes when I tell him the time is right. This year I am working my way through the seasonal hatches to cover all the bases. First came a pair of delicate Catskill ties, the first ones, Gordon Quills. My A.I. Hendrickson 100-Year Duns joined them, and this morning Translucence March Brown 100-Year Duns – those of the smiling Cree hackles! This box might have been filled by now, had I not continued to struggle with the cough.

December has been relatively mild, our only snow coming in little dustings windblown from the Great Lakes. If not for my bad reaction when chilled air enters my lungs, I would have hunted many days this month. Coughing fits would scare any deer within half a mile though, and I dare not risk it getting worse.

March Browns have made me think of May, when the forests have that first blush of brilliant green, and the heavy hatches of the quills and the Hendricksons have passed. These big pale yellow flies are fine fare for a hunting trout, making for joyful days for this stalking angler. It is great fun to tie a big dry fly on and stalk from run to pool. Once the hatch has started one needn’t look for the flies bouncing on the current, watching instead for boils or rises amid the tumult.

Many a fine brown, with wide shoulders and spotted flanks has come to net courtesy of these sporadic mayflies! I can see the action before me, the sun warming away the morning chill, and there where a rock or fallen limb breaks the faster current I turn when I hear the plunk of a rise nearby. The sound provides direction and my eyes, and decades of May days astream, pick out the locations. Often the first cast to land true brings a heavy bow in the rod, though sometimes a fish requires more seduction.

If the dun fails to excite him to the surface, there’s a wiggling CDC emergent morsel to turn his attention which follows.

My thoughts return to one old heavyweight who situated himself beside a sunken ball of broken branches, piled along a deep bank by spring floodwaters. He was careful in his perusal of the drifting fare, and I had to trim away half the wing of my emerger to suit his tastes. He bored down into that mass of wood and we found stalemate for a few moments! Luckily the tippet held and I turned his head at last to open water.

I hope these flies make memories like that for my dear friend!

Sitting in my small living room this morning, I watched the faint golden glow of sunrise tinge the air along the mountain tops toward the north. How I do love life in the Catskills! There are mountains surrounding this river valley village providing ever changing views through the seasons, and I enjoy them all.

I had Dana Lamb’s 1965 book “Woodsmoke and Watercress” in hand, fishing with him all down the Beaver Kill, and dreaming with him of salmon camps and the glorious days and nights on the Maine lakes. I took note of a special mention of one particular Beaver Kill pool, one that I haunt for a number of days both early and late in our Catskill seasons. That pool appears in several stories, enough so that I wonder if it may be the salutations of the great writer’s ghost I hear on the winds.

In and after the Golden Age, Lamb fished not only the abundant public waters of the region’s most storied river, but the private club held waters above Roscoe. Though I followed his ghost to his beloved Pigpen Pool, I have never shared the privilege of angling those hallowed club waters of the upper river. It is a pleasure though to realize that I may have indeed sat upon the same rock on a downstream riverbank, staring across the wide currents at a rise on another closely watched rock on the opposite riverbank, and listened to his voice in the wind.

A single turn of silk and it all begins. As each material is positioned and lashed to the hook, the anticipation grows. This is more than just a fly, it is a door opened, tackle packed in the car, and the morning sunshine on the drive to the river.

The mind conjures that special quality of the light on a favored lie, and then my hand seems to feel the cork as it tightens for the cast. That simple fly is now an experience unto itself as it drifts downstream.

I have always cherished the connection to the fishing that my fly tying provides. As each turn of hackle settles into that magic whirl of barbs, I see the whirl of a take upon bright water and feel the heavy pull as a great fish turns and runs with every measure of the wild energy alive in his spotted form! As the silk traps the hackle and pulls it tight behind the hook’s eye, I thrill to the tightness of the line, the throbbing of the cane and the glorious symphony of a Hardy check o’er the murmur of bright water.

The cold months pass, and the compartments in the fly boxes are filled, yet there is more in there than the flies themselves. Beneath the tumbled hackles, tails and wings are the memories of rivers, pictures of those favorite runs bubbling in springtime’s heavy flows and of pools glowing with the soft glint of summer’s light along a riverbank dappled with shade.

The Winter Solstice arrives tonight at 10:27 PM, and tomorrow the days begin to lengthen gradually, achingly, at a pace which reminds me of a quiet approach across a silken pool amid the low flows of summer, with the wide rings of a soft rise in the distance. Many turns of silk lie ahead.

It is cold and quiet here in Crooked Eddy, with a fresh dusting of snow. North, East and West of Hancock the rivers are receding after some three inches of rain. But for the gift of warmer air from this storm travelling from the south, we could be covered in a heavy white blanket destined to endure until spring.

The Beaver Kill crested eight and a half feet above it’s normal level yesterday, well into it’s official flood stage. It’s peak flow has been halved this morning, though it will take some days before the familiar gentleness of a trout river returns.

As the rains came, I sat and worked a beeswax polish along the subtle tapers of two bamboo fly rods, my fingers remembering their feel when ignited by Nature’s magic and electricity. Though it has been winter since November’s dawn here in the Catskills, the seasons of practicality and the calendar will coincide in just two days. Christmas will follow closely, and my annual 100-day countdown ’till a hoped for dry fly season will commence on New Year’s Eve.

With less than two weeks remaining in this 2023, my log totals one hundred eight dozen flies tied, short of my typical production. Then again, this is the time of year I often tie flies for distant friends, so that total should rise, though surely I will not log the more than twenty dozen required to reach my mark.

We had a little break on Saturday, taking advantage of welcome fifty-degree sunshine to drive north to listen to our friend Nate Gross play his incomparable guitar. A master of electric blues, rock and anything else one might want to hear when leading his band, he amazed alone with an acoustic guitar in the packed and cheery Norwich pub. It’s good to get some of that energy to help us through winter!

Today I’ll spend with Lamb and Schwiebert, and perhaps wrap a few hackles to begin to fill one of those boxes for my friends. I attempt to guess when they might arrive, that I might present them with the correct flies for that turn of the season. Quills and Hendricksons or March Browns and Sulfurs? Well, they don’t often come calling until well into May…

The two I am thinking of have the limestone waters at their doorsteps, though the fishing in that lovely valley has suffered over time. There is hope on the horizon, at least in the hearts of anglers, that the halcyon days on Falling Spring, Big Spring and the fair Letort might one day return. I hope it comes to pass!

Thoughts of limestone springs cannot help but invoke my longing for the promise of dry fly fishing which lurked there throughout the year. Winter midges, olives on the snow, and Ed Shenk’s smiling tales of fishing a sulfur hatch in every month of the year – such are the memories that tug at my emotions.

These days I winter here, and if the snow and ice fails to turn the mountain ridges hazardous too soon, I may walk there with a shotgun and a quick eye. After New Years, I begin to watch the parade of winter storms, seeking those faint promises of southerly flows and warming trends. If I catch one right, I hope to string up an old bamboo rod and swing a favorite fly along the rocky river bottom. Could this be the moment a big old warrior awakens to ease his hunger?