It is the twenty-second of January, and eight degrees here in Crooked Eddy. Sixty-seven days have passed since I last waded bright water and bid farewell to another season, so in truth, I am not yet halfway through winter’s journey. My thoughts once more run to summer…

I was sitting, huddled in a blanket this morning reading Rhoderick Haig-Brown. As he recounted the various streamer flies employed for the native cutthroats, salmon and steelhead of his Campbell River, my mind wandered to Ernie Schwiebert’s Letort Beetle. It has been many years since I tied and fished that groundbreaking classic.

Ernie recounted the fly’s birth in his “Legend and the Letort” from “Remembrances of Rivers Past” (Copyright 1972 Ernest Schwiebert): “Ross Trimmer and I were sitting in the Turnaround Meadow one August afternoon. I was tying flies and noticed some pheasant skin pieces in a hackle cannister. There were a few dark greenish throat-feathers on one fragment. We tried them instead of Jungle Cock, soaking several feathers together with lacquer to get toughness and opacity.” He trimmed these to an oval shape and tied them in flat over trimmed hackles, adding “Success was remarkable and immediate.” Schwiebert recognized the perfection of Vincent Marinaro’s concept of silhouette being the trigger for the Letort’s summer sipping trout and modified the Jassid style to mimic the larger and more robust beetles so prolific in the water meadows. Anglers have been grateful for his chance inspection of that hackle cannister for decades!

While there are days upon our summer rivers that I do best with a beetle that plops when it lands upon the surface, there are times during the lowest flows when such patterns are ignored. The trout lurking in the hides of the still pools are wary, and my summer fly box needs a row of Schwiebert’s genius!

Just over the mountain, beside the gliding waters of the West Branch Delaware, Dennis Menscer applies the final coats of varnish to my ultimate foil for days such as those, a flamed eight-foot wand to make magic with a number three line! If I close my eyes I can feel it now, laying out a feather beetle like a whisper of soft summer air…

I am caught in time, dreaming of summer delight amid the unforgiving chill of winter.

Indeed, a good half-dozen of those beetles must be tied, and I know just the feathers to employ. I have a black phase cock pheasant skin that should enhance that critical opacity.

Soon, I must begin the task of sorting fly boxes, noting any patterns and sizes that need replenishing. Reels and lines were put away cleaned and ready for use, but they will get a look, just in case. Still so many days without chance for fishing. The rivers are high and icy, reservoirs spilling into their tailwaters, and rain and a warmup headed in this week. The snow will be melted rapidly once more, and the rivers rise.

What I need is moderate flow, that joyful fifty-degree warm spell, and sunshine! Those are the days when a swung fly might tempt leviathan.

There is a taste of sunshine this morning, though it is not expected to last. The air will not warm for hours, and then not much above freezing. The paradox of timing looms as I ponder a riverwalk, the sun lights the old road and the mountainside until mid-morning, when the air still lies cold. The sun warms the body and brings cheer, yet I fear the frigid air will torture my beleaguered lungs.

Tomorrow will bring snow and ice, and as the week warms the rain will fall, erasing the winter clarity of the big river.

Yes, I am a true believer in matching fly color to the mayflies and caddisflies I find on my favorite waters. The preponderance of my own experiences convinced me long ago that matching the color and the translucency of the insects I seek to imitate is a lofty but worthwhile goal.

I enjoy the various discussions whenever this topic comes up. Within the Catskill Fly Tyers Guild, there are many talented fly tyers, some who I accord the title of scholars in deference to their broad knowledge of the history of dry fly fishing and the art of enticing our quarry to the surface. I often find these fellows stacked against me in the color debate. As much as I respect their knowledge and opinions, I simply cannot ignore my own experiences.

In the broad realm of our immersion in angling though, there will always be instances that run counter to each of our accepted theories and beliefs. In discussing a featured fly for next week’s online gathering, the Blue Quill dry fly was suggested and embraced. I offered my own derivation pictured above for those interested in a non-traditional and easy to tie pattern that has proven itself time and again. It happens to be though, one of those proofs against the color theory.

Throughout my decades angling the Catskills, I have been a fly tyer, fishing almost singularly with my own flies. During all of those years, I did occasionally purchase some flies to fill an immediate need. These flies came from only two sources: the Dette shop on Cottage Street and flies tied by the late Dennis Skarka of Catskill Flies. It was Dennis’ pattern for the Blue Quill that inspired my own tie.

Dennis was a perfectionist at the vise, and took the time to bleach his own peacock eyes to secure lighter quills with the dark ribbing he desired for his pattern. He tied a synthetic winged parachute with dun tailing and wrapped hackle, a simple, beautiful fly that was very well received by the trout. I changed the body, being unwilling to endure the bleaching of peacock eyes and turning to the black and white barred primaries of our eastern wild turkey. The biot fibers vary, and the tyer can alter the general appearance of the dark ribbed body from a stark black and white to black with a light to medium gray, by selecting the biot fibers carefully. Blue Quill hatches can be remarkably heavy, and the reflective properties of the steel gray Antron yarn wing post make these small flies visible when light is difficult, the windblown surface is choppy, or the naturals are overwhelmingly numerous.

The underside of the natural mayfly varies also, from shades of brown to brownish gray, so to fit my own color theory the fly requires a brown abdomen, not one of black and white or banded shades of gray. The trouble is this fly, like Dennis Skarka’s original, is a deadly taker of trout feeding upon Blue Quills.

Nearly all of the dry flies of my own design sit low on the water, their bodies in the film, something I tend to remind my contemporaries when discussing (arguing?) the color theory. Many maintain that color matching is vital in wet flies, but needless in dries. I find my belief in color matching is reinforced season after season, though there are exceptions. If I force myself to set aside the Skarka influenced Blue Quill and fish brown bodies, I might find reinforcement in even better performance, but that is going to take some time. The old turkey biot fly isn’t going to be replaced with a dyed biot or Translucence Series fly until it fails, one day when I am certain the refusing trout is taking Blue Quills!

The fly carries a lot of memories including the capture of the hard charging twenty-two inch West Branch brown that christened my “Trout Bum” bamboo rod, a gorgeous three-piece eight-footer crafted by my friend Wyatt Dietrich in tribute to his mentor, the late George Maurer. That moment came amid the turmoil of trying to find a home here in the Catskills in early 2018, a season that didn’t end up granting me a lot of time on the water.

That same parachute allowed me to tangle with the one of the largest brownies I have ever battled, a fish I believed would have topped 28 inches if the little size 18 hook would have held for that last fifteen feet to the net! We never forget those that remain almosts.

Thank you Dennis, may they rise frequently for your beautiful flies as you angle around the next bend. I miss our talks and fondly recall the gift of our last one!

Another cold day here in Crooked Eddy, colder than I would like, though not as cold as Mississippi yesterday morn. I have set half a dozen quill bodies aside to dry that I might complete the flies this evening when the electronic variation of the Catskill Fly Tyers Guild convenes. I am partial to the luster and protection provided by a coat or two of Hard As Hull polymer head cement and tying a clean fly demands time to allow the potion to harden. I find it fish proofs the delicate quill bodied flies, though beware that a grasp and a twist with forceps can still ruin your fly.

The lead photos dramatically demonstrate why I so miss the natural dun toned CDC. Compare the play of light (my daylight spectrum tying lamp) on both natural and imitation. Dyed feathers simply cannot give a tyer that! I eschew dyed hackle capes for the same reason.

This evening’s gathering will discuss many of the classic patterns designed to match the various mayflies recognized as the Hendrickson hatch, featuring the Red Quill. Art Flick’s original is a beautiful fly, and I regret that I do not encounter these “males of Ephemerella subvaria” every season. My most reliable reference for mayflies remains Al Caucci’s and Bob Nastasi’s Hatches II which, if memory serves, maintains that long held conclusion. The authors do discuss several different species of Ephemerella flies they all consider to be Hendricksons.

Currently, on Catskill rivers I find the tan bodied flies to be most common, usually a rather uniform size 14, though I once saw a large number of them in size 12 on the Neversink tailwater, and a few of these on the Beaver Kill. The Red Quills are indeed smaller, matched with a size 16. I have plucked them from the surface to find dark red bodies like Flick’s fly, bright red bodies and even what I relate to a powdery antique brick red. I have not seen this variation within a single emergence, and cannot say if all of these, or indeed any, were subvaria males. I do tie separate imitations for each!

I have noted a very large tannish brick red fly on the Beaver Kill which seems a lit larger than a size 12, and might be better matched by a size 10 standard dry fly hook, and on each occasion, there were the ubiquitous tan bodied size 14’s on the water with them. Have I noted new species of mayflies? I don’t think so, rather some of Nature’s very unique variations that I guess may be attributable to changes in water chemistry.

Though I once suggested to anyone who asked that they carry the venerable Red Quill in size 16 on these waters, seeing so many variations would lead me to recommend they might catalog that classic fly from size 18 up to size 10, just in case.

Here in the Catskills, the Hendricksons are my favorite hatches, and seem to be less variable in their intensity from year to year. In light of that, I tie, and have tied, far more than I my ever use. There are always new ideas, and of course I don’t ever wish to run out of the hot pattern during a hatch!

It is likely that I will reorganize my main fly boxes once more this winter, relegating the flies to fish over the Blue Quills and Quill Gordons to their own box, sharing some space for a few choice olives. After last April, a few size 18 ants will be tucked into the box’s foam lid! The Hendricksons have more than earned their own fly box, a special, classic Wheatley!

It seems I have had variants on my mind of late. They have ghosted through much of my recent reading including Art Flick’s biography, and the stories of Gene Connett, Dana Lamb and others. In fact, I was moved to tie a quarter dozen quill bodied Hendrickson Variants just this morning.

I remember these beautiful big dry flies drawing my interest very early in my fly-tying career. When I first visited the Catskills more than three decades ago, I came armed with Mr. Flick’s favorite fly, the Gray Fox Variant. His Dun Variant was another pattern that was stored in one of my big compartment fly boxes, one that had seen some use back home in Pennsylvania, where the Isonychia mayflies Flick designed these big dries to imitate were found on waters such as the Little Juniata River.

I confess that my fascination with these flies waned over the years, enthralled as I was with my own patterns and experimentation. I have stashed a few variants in my big fly boxes in recent years once more, and my plan is to give them some time on the water.

One the recurring themes with classic fly patterns is that their reputations as trout catchers have been earned through decades of seasons and thousands of anglers. A majority among the new guard seems drawn to the latest conglomeration of materials, foam, synthetic flash, bug eyes and rubber legs that gets featured in magazines and videoed on YouTube. As a result, our heavily pressured wild trout do not have the familiarity with the classics that their ancestors did. That lack of familiarity often results in a lack of the avoidance behavior frequently observed on our popular rivers.

I would guess that there are a lot of brown trout out there that have never had a variant dry fly floated over them, and that makes me think I should have them on my tippet rather than sitting in a fly box!

Art Flick considered his Gray Fox Variant to be a good imitation for the Green Drake, as well as pale Potamanthus mayflies, but it was his favorite pattern to fish regardless of the presence of these two giant mayflies. If you think about it, there do tend to be a few big bugs around through a long stretch of the trout season and, while a Gray Fox Variant may not be the best hatch matcher’s choice when trout are rising to sulfurs, these big flies might just be golden when cast and twitched around cover when there is no hatch going on. How many times have you seen or heard a terrific splash on one of those dead days?

I plan to fluff up the hackles on some of my stored variants and make sure they are handy once those long, sunny days of spring and summer roll around.

Come to think of it, there is one Art Flick variant that I have been fishing regularly. The Flick Blue Winged Olive is really a scaled down variant tie. I have had some great success in recent summers fishing the sparse little pale olives I find on summer mornings. I tie a thin thread body on size 20 and 22 dry fly hooks with a long, sparse hackle fiber tail and an oversized rusty dun hackle. I have taken some big browns on these and found them surprisingly visible even on long casts across flat, featureless pools.

Besides enjoying great writing, reading old, classic angling books can give you some fresh ideas and expand your knowledge of the wonderful pursuit of dry fly fishing.

Last night I shared a special dry fly with my friends of the Catskill Fly Tyers Guild, a simple little dry fly I call the CDX. Sharing a favorite fly pattern isn’t generally a big deal, though in a way, this one was, for time has proven it to be one of the best designs I have ever created.

This fly came about some fifteen years ago, and I had kept it a secret, known only to three of my best and most trusted friends. I had liked Craig Matthews well known X Caddis for some time. It is a simple and effective dry fly that sits low on the surface. I used to tie mine with a thinner trailing shuck than the original, something I did most of the time when I used a shuck on any dry fly. I figured that, if the X-Caddis was a good fly, then maybe I could make a caddis pattern that was even better.

Readers here know that I have used CDC feathers throughout my thirty some years as a fly tyer. I didn’t start because it became popular. I started using it the first time I laid eyes on these wispy little feathers because their appearance screamed movement. Real insects move, and our heavily pressured wild trout have learned that lesson well. I set out to design a versatile caddis fly that moved in the currents and moved in the wind.

I wanted to take advantage of the materials used to make my caddis look alive, and I began with the X-Caddis’ trailing shuck. A trailing shuck is great for an emerging insect, but I didn’t want my new caddis to be limited to hatch conditions. I also think that a lot of tyers use far too much material when they add a trailing shuck to a fly. I wanted movement and the sparkle of light reflections, so I used a very small number of Antron yarn fibers and teased them with a pull across my scissors blade. That frays and crinkles the fibers of the yarn giving me a wild and very sparse “bubble tail” – movement, air bubbles and sparkle equal life!

I have a group of dubbing blends that I have prepared over the years to match the caddisflies I have encountered. My general formula calls for a rough fur with short spiky guard hairs, and squirrel is my favorite. I add a small amount of compatibly colored Antron dubbing and then some of the yarn itself, cut very short, say 1/16th of an inch long. I choose and blend various colors to match the insect, ending up with a rough, spiky, sparkly body. These blends were perfect for the new CDX.

Paramount in getting the movement I was after were the wings, and there is no better choice than CDC oiler puffs. If I can get those in a little larger size for caddis in sizes sixteen and up, I am a very happy fly tyer. The puffs have a curvature along their length, and tying in a pair of them side by side with the tips curving away from one another makes an ideal moving caddis wing.

I finished my prototype with a couple of turns of barred dry fly hackle. CDC will get wetted eventually during fishing, and a touch of hackle for a collar provides some floatation as well as a light pattern for the insect’s legs. Once tied, I set out to find out if my new design fished as good as I planned.

I learned that I had something special when I tied a Shadfly CDX to my tippet here in the Catskills. It did not matter whether the trout were taking hatching flies, egg laying flies, or spent caddis, they eagerly accepted the CDX. Many big Catskill browns have fallen for this simple fly, trout that ignored or refused other usually effective caddis patterns.

On the first day of summer 2013, I was fishing limestone home waters on Big Spring south of Newville, Pennsylvania. I carried my seven-and-a-half-foot DreamCatcher bamboo rod with a size 18 tan CDX when I saw the rainbow pictured above lying in a deep pocket of crystal-clear water. The trout wasn’t rising, though there were a few small tan caddis flying around. This fish rose and sucked in my CDX on the second cast igniting the fight of my angling life!

It is rare today for me to fish any other caddis pattern during the season. I choose an appropriate CDX to match the flies I observe or the species that is active at that time of year, and I fish it with unfailing confidence. So that is why the fly has been a well-guarded secret for so many years.

You can fish the CDX in flats, riffles or runs, no matter what the caddisflies are doing. If there is a trout out there who is willing to rise to a caddisfly, he’s going to eat a well-presented CDX. I do tie a few of mine with a little extra hackle, three or four turns instead of only two, reserving these for the heaviest water.

During more than three decades of fishing Pennsylvania limestone spring creeks and beautiful Catskill freestoners and tailwaters, I have too often witnessed wild trout taking selectivity to it’s outer limits, taking only the natural caddis or mayflies that moved within their window. Movement within the fly and an optical simulation of movement and thus life are our best weapons when we engage these super-select spotted warriors!

That title was once a very common utterance. In my youth, thousands of products from household gadgets to automobiles were hawked with a “ninety-day guarantee”, and those that didn’t sell so fast might be offered on time: “ninety-days same as cash”. The point is that, back then, ninety-days was considered a substantial amount of time.

These days, I guess that period represents the last significant milepost along the long journey through winter; spring may not be imminent, but it isn’t a lifetime away either.

The snow is falling heavily here in Crooked Eddy, and I am hoping that it continues. No, I don’t wish to be buried in it, but the alternative is said to be a couple of inches of rain on top of the snow fallen during the passage of these two winter storms. I don’t care to see my rivers battered with flood waters. There are trout eggs down in that gravel, and millions of immature insects, two classes of life that I would like to find more of when spring does beckon me back to the water’s edge.

Just over the mountain here, three beautifully flamed pieces of bamboo are being perfectly crafted into next summer’s magic, and that is the thought I like to keep foremost in my mind! I need to get out the fly boxes that house the tiny pale olives, sulfurs and terrestrials that are essential to that magic, to take stock of which patterns I need to tie, and perhaps put my mind to designing a new one.

Ah summer! You lie out there at the limits of my vision!

It is easy to sit and dream of balmy days upon bright water. My memories are full of sunlight and it’s sparkle on the gentle riffles, images of a secret wink of light beyond the edge of shade, my grip tightened on the cork. Though I feel blessed to wander rivers any day of the year, summer is my favorite season!

As I gazed at the warm brown cane I was taken there, crouching along the edge of a flat and mesmerized by an intermittent ripple in the current fifty feet away. A flick of my wrist and the thin gray line unrolls, my little fly settles gently and nearly vanishes in the drift. Time stops, until that ripple becomes a ring, and that warm brown cane turns to lightning in my hand!

It finally looks like winter this morning, more than two months into the great void. So far, this much talked about first winter storm has not hit Crooked Eddy too hard. It is still snowing though.

The Weather Channel was all abuzz about double digit snowfall in New York and Pennsylvania, but we have nothing like that here. I was missing the snow as Christmas came and went, but I don’t need a foot of it to bring a smile.

The specter that is still hovering involves storm number two, expected to bring more snow to begin the week and then rain and warmer temperatures midweek. Catskill anglers, and all who love these rivers would heartily prefer a flood-free season.

I would like to see a couple of little warming trends each month now until spring. Ideally, that would give me a day or two during each of winter’s remaining months to get out and wander along a riverbank, with a little hope that something spotted might intercept the swing of my fly. Time to keep working with the movement flies I have designed, and perhaps even devise another.

Right now, I am in the midst of the annual lull in my fly tying. I finished out the year 2023 with a few ideas, and now I am taking it easy for a while and enjoying my winter reading.

I missed the first winter fly tying session at the Museum yesterday, and I hear that quite a few of our Guild tyers showed up, despite the snowstorm bearing down upon us. I really didn’t feel up to it and didn’t want to spend the afternoon coughing at my fellow fly tyers. I’m on my doctor’s third suggestion to beat this bronchitis, and I really hope it works before the next little gathering in two weeks.

The books are keeping me connected to bright waters for now, although most of the best ones are older volumes which speak of days long gone. I do tend to smile at the fact that our Catskill rivers have continued, something not expected in many of the angling writings penned after WWII. Despite our environmental progress, there are still great challenges ahead, lest the current generation be the last to experience the wonder of wild trout rising to a mayfly hatch.

For my morning reading today, I savored an old classic penned by the late Eugene V. Connett. The little book entitled “Magic Hours” held a pair of tales, the titled story and one called “Secret Waters”. He told of a Long Island meadow stream, spring fed, and briskly cold in August, and the wonderful wild brook trout he caught there.

Small streams fed by limestone springs have a magical allure, and I wandered along many of them during the years I lived in Southcentral Pennsylvania. There was always that hope of discovering something special!

Sadly, I never found a real pot-of-gold at the end of any of those limestone rainbows. Man’s talent for polluting, bulldozing, and generally destroying such treasures is no secret, and yet I strive to retain just a bit of hope in my heart.

There is another classic old volume on my bookshelf that tells of a forgotten region of limestone fed streams, and that leads me toward dreaming once more. The area is still farm country, and I cannot help but wonder if a few of those forgotten waters still run clear and cold, the homes of precious forgotten strains of wild trout. If man has not seen fit to bring the ruination he so often has, perhaps a tour with a light cane rod and a stream thermometer could reveal at least a hint of the magic revealed in the words of a gentle, long departed angler scribe.

Oh how I would love to find a secret gem, where an old man might cast a dry fly in January, February and March! Too much to ask in these times I am certain. Secret waters are a myth in these days of rabid information… or are they?

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.