The spring sunshine feels good on my shoulders when the chilled breeze lessens. It is past Noon, and the April waters it is hoped will awaken soon. I walk twenty or thirty yards then stand and watch the wrinkled coverlet of the river’s surface. Moving ever upstream, I find no signs of life, simply glare and the vagaries of current. The scene is beautiful though it displays no promise.

After a few hours of this I finally see a subtle wink of light across the run, there where the current levels out a bit and bounces off the angled edge of a bankside boulder. I find a seat in the browned grass on the riverbank, just high enough that I may watch closely for another wink.

Waiting, I check the fly that has spent the past few hours taught against the nickel silver ring that serves as hook keeper: Gordon’s Quill awaits the season’s first cast.

Perhaps half an hour passes, and then I see that second wink of light, and the soft ripple beside the rock that lets me know that a trout lies there. There are wings on the surface of the run. Just a few, but clearly enough for this trout and this angler. I rise and step softly into the flow, study the currents and begin an approach to take advantage of their ability to mask my movements. The speed and direction of flow tells me to position myself upstream from my now conspicuous bankside rock, and I work slowly toward a spot that looks perfect.

The high spring flow pulls me up short of my mark, and I can feel my heart rate rising in my chest as I anchor my feet to find a steady hold amid the current, to feel confidence in old legs months removed from wading rocky river bottoms. Thus secured, I take the fly from it’s keeper and squeeze a tiny pinch of floatant onto my finger tips, then massage it gently into hackle, tail and wings. I have done these things many thousands of times, though here and now they feel new.

Pulling line from the well-worn spool of the reel, I pull the leader knot through the tiptop and drop the first ten feet of line on the water, wiggling the rod to feed more slack into the currents. The fly itself comes to hand where I blow away the water droplets and settle in to study the rolling surface along my particularly interesting rock…

There! A wink and a ripple are spied once more and my rod hand comes up as I trade the fly for a handful of trailing slack, the first of several to be loosed as my cast is extended toward it’s ultimate goal.

The fly alights and drifts down past my rock, once, twice and finally a third time. In an electric moment of expectation and joy, that third drift doesn’t make it all of the way past my rock, becoming another wink of light and a ripple before my eyes!

The arch of the bamboo meets the trout’s desire for freedom as he swings out away from the bank and into the full force of the run. My reel chatters in protest for the first time since autumn, and the new season begins at last!

Roughly two weeks remain in this year, and I have settled into my winter routine. It is expected at this time to take a look back at the year completed, something I believe most of us do. For anglers, particularly those of us of a certain age, we become more acutely aware there are fewer of those golden days upon bright water ahead of us than behind.

In two thousand twenty-three I was blessed to spend one hundred thirteen days upon the rivers of my heart. Yes, there are more days on the calendar between April and October, but there are days when the weather is simply unsuitable for fly fishing. In my travelling days, my standards were more liberal, due to the overall shortage of days on Catskill rivers I was able to manage. I have fished in forty mile-per-hour winds, with gusts to fifty, though common sense now governs such decisions.

Still throughout this past season, I have seen most of our hatches declining. I maintain hope that I am witnessing just the cyclic patterns of Nature, and not a lasting absence of some of our most treasured mayflies. The fishing itself, and in saying that I mean dry fly fishing, continues nonetheless. With diligent hunting, I share the magic and energy of a good number of large wild trout each season. For the most part, there is considerable effort involved, and it is the day-to-day rhythm of these efforts that I cherish. Time on the water reveals so much, intrigues the mind and nourishes the soul.

I was reading Dana Lamb’s first book this morning and was touched by his remembrances of decades of Catskill fishing. He sang a song of subtle regret for the loss of the wild trout that once thrilled anglers on the miles of the Beaver Kill, though he closed with a fresh memory of an enchanted evening where he found a good measure of that which he had lamented to be lost. Lamb lived from “the fourth day of 1900 until the sixth day of 1986” as penned by his children in the foreword to that book, so he truly lived and fished throughout the Golden Age. I believe that is one of the reasons I read his nine volumes each winter, to share in his love of bright water and truly appreciate his profound perspective.

When “On Trout Streams and Salmon Rivers” was published in 1963, Lamb wrote of the early days as well as the years after World War II, when growth and development greatly changed the rivers. He found hordes of fishermen “looking more for fish than fishing” during those years, and his perspective, sunlit by the treasured angling experienced during the Golden Age, lamented the loss of those halcyon days of sport.

I still find thousands of anglers on our Catskill rivers today, some travelling from throughout the world to angle here at mecca. While there are stretches of water well populated by the pale little trout from the hatcheries that Lamb feared had forever replaced the beautiful wild creatures he once angled for, we are blessed to have good populations of strong, colorful wild trout in these hallowed rivers. We have learned to be better stewards of Nature’s gifts and, though there is still great progress needed toward that goal, the rivers where American dry fly fishing was born still flourish.

Those of us who take the time to know these rivers understand that the gifts the rivers bestow are not all about quantity, but truly about quality in ways both tangible and intangible. I am thankful for all of those one hundred thirteen days, for whether fine trout were fished to and landed, or my casts fell upon silent currents, each day upon bright water offers a draught of the sublime.

Drawn to the porch by the cloudless sky, I found the bright ball of the sun already low o’er the top of Point Mountain. That last glow urged the thermometer to an unbelievable sixty-five degrees on this fifteenth of December.

I sat for those last few minutes, the last full rays of that sunshine warming my chest, and nary a cough escaped my lips.

There is still crusty snow on the shady side of my little clapboard house, but oh the pleasures of those brief moments of porch sitting!

The sun shines brightly in the winter sky, threatening to warm our mountain air enough to flirt with fifty degrees. Oh, how I wish I could slip away and swing a fly for a couple of hours! Alas, an old enemy – bronchitis – has me coughing and retching horribly with even a short walk in the winter air. I am a prisoner of memories…

There has been a great deal of observation and fly tying experimentation these past few seasons, committed as I have become to hunting the great wild trout of the rivers of my heart. If I let my mind wander a bit, the patterns that worked exceptional magic bring a smile, brightened by the memory of the moments that crystallized my resolve to continue my quest.

Tied first as a Poster, she produced some mesmerizing moments during a lull in the seasonal hatches. I was angling on a favorite reach of bright water on such a day. There were barely enough flies to bring a few soft rises intermittently, and the timing and location made me feel certain they were sulfurs. None of my tried-and-true sulfurs drew any interest from a trout, and then I remembered that Delaware morning. I set to work on one devilishly inviting riseform and the ensuing battle left me breathless when I brought a heavily muscled two-foot brownie to the net!

That was not to be the end of my day, for the fly I have come to call the Lady H fooled another leviathan of like proportions come early afternoon. The lady has since earned her own fly box, which harbors an assortment of Posters, parachutes, CDC Duns and 100-Year Duns! She makes magic between the earlier Hendricksons and the March Browns, when long days on the river sometimes reveal few risers, thus the little Lady H has stolen this angler’s heart!

I recall showing some early 100-Year Duns to a friend who asked me why the wing was “pushed down like that”. I continually pay homage to the father, Theodore Gordon, for the inspiration to begin my journey tying the single canted wood duck wing. Though my signature fly began with the Green Drakes all those years ago, the expansion into all of the other primary Catskill hatches has revealed just how effective this style of fly can be. In particular, the small flies have been revolutionary.

Last year, late October, and my season finale proved to be perfection. I had tied three little 100-Year Duns on size 18 hooks, dubbed with my old favorite olive muskrat fur, and winged with widgeon. Late in the afternoon I stalked a low, clear flat and discovered a gentle dimple near a fallen branch in the edge of the shade. The fly was cast short, one time to assess the float, then offered to the full soft ring before me. Oh, she spun the Hardy LRH madly as she streaked to mid-river, my coveted T&T Hendrickson bowed mercilessly! Captured, she was a gorgeous apparition of gold and bronze, my final trophy for the dry fly season.

In April, I live and breathe for the Hendricksons, but even with a good hatch on the water, Nature can weave a mystery of deceit. It was not one of those days to find multiple risers, and when I finally found one good fish in a difficult lie, I gave my full attention. It took me some time to realize that, though there were plenty of plump Hendrickson duns dancing on the broken currents above that trout, I had failed to see even one vanish in the soft rings that betrayed my fish’s lie. There had been little flurries of smaller flies earlier in the day, but I was seeing only Hendricksons out there on that run.

My eyes fell upon the last of those little widgeon-winged olives tied last fall, and I smiled as I plucked it from my fly box. All hail the little 100-Year Duns!

I missed last week’s Zoom gathering of the Catskill Fly Tyers Guild, not by intent certainly, but as a result of battling the end of a nasty head cold and the onslaught of the bronchitis that used to plague me during my working years. To avoid another misstep due to weariness, I have been playing with some hackles and dubbing this morning, preparing for tomorrow eveningof .

Though our tying sessions are intended to be casual, our President likes to have some attention brought to a classic Catskill fly to begin these meetings and looks to someone to volunteer to pick a fly and demonstrate it. This opening interlude does help to keep our group aware of our mission and appreciation of the history of Catskill fly tying, and it does help make members aware of some of the lesser known patterns. I am a fan of this week’s fly myself, none other than the late John Atherton’s No. 4 dry fly.

Some may think of the No. 4 as the artist/angler’s Hendrickson, for his blend of natural and dyed red seal fur, muskrat and hare’s ear was mixed to produce a “grayed, mixed pink” coloration. In truth, he intended it to be fished when a variety of pinkish, reddish hued flies were on the water, including some of the spinners. My initial blend from a winter or two ago proved to be darker than I believe Atherton intended, so this morning’s first task was to lighten it up a bit. I have a piece of beaver pelt dyed pink, so I cut a little in various shades, adding that and a bit more silvery gray muskrat underfur. It looks better to me now, more like the color his words conveyed, so I will see how the trout like it.

Jack Atheron’s ideas of color in nature fit with my own concepts, borne of decades of observation. Natural things are not cast in plain solid colors, there are mixed shades of blended and primary colors and iridescence mingled in Nature’s hues. I unknowingly agreed with Atherton’s impressionistic theories of fly color long before I secured a copy of his only angling book; “The Fly and the Fish”. Becoming well acquainted with his ideas in recent years, I now count him as an influence in my own tying and fly design.

I tied an initial pair of Number Fours in my 100-Year Dun style during my preparation for tomorrow evening’s meeting. I experimented with a mix of Cree and barred medium dun hackles on the first fly, then turned back to Atherton’s recipe, using Cree and medium dun for the second. This style of tie is less suited to the use of two individual hackles than a Catskill fly, so I expect that my final version will be tied with a beautifully barred Dun Cree Collins cape. I will see how I like that choice when I tie some during the Zoom meeting.

I began re-reading “The Fly and the Fish” yesterday, eager to refresh my memory. I’m about halfway through, just coming to the patterns and his discussions concerning their creation and use. Winter is my reading season after all.

The dust upon the rod racks lies undisturbed, and the vise sits idly amid the clutter of my bench. The unrequited fervor of a season closed too soon has passed, and I have settled in for winter.

A dusting of snow greeted my first vision from Angler’s Rest this morning, bringing surprise later on as I learned of school delays throughout the region. While the snow didn’t amount to much, there must have been some icing on the roadways to elicit such panic over a dusting. Hopefully, all are safe.

I turned to my angling library this morning, choosing a little book from 1965; R. Palmer Baker’s “The Sweet of the Year”. Winter always finds me turning my thoughts to the Golden Age of which Mr. Baker writes.

There are many fine writers and anglers who chronicled those years, favorites like Dana Lamb and Sparse Gray Hackle, and world traveled Ernest Schwiebert. Their works provide my sustenance of the soul during the long months of a Catskill winter.

My fly tying has entered it’s annual lull, since there is no fishing on the horizon. Talk of Catskill patterns and history during our Thursday evening Guild meetings will spur my fingers into action soon enough. We will pass mid-December this week, leaving roughly four months of waiting for that first flutter of gray mayfly wings upon the leaden surface of a river still shivering from long days and nights of ice and snow.

Four months still feels like an eternity to the dry fly angler; but four is better than six, eh?

Ah, the “first” American dry fly! Theordore Gordon’s peacock quill bodied mayfly imitation enjoys that historic distinction, although it cannot be proved to be so. Certainly, this is the creation most associated with the enigmatic Mr. Gordon, and undoubtedly his most famous pattern, though no one can say it was positively his first attempt at imitating American Catskill river mayflies. Still beautiful and effective well more than a century after his death, the fly stands on it’s own merit.

This is the fly I chose to begin my 2023 season on the hallowed Beaver Kill. Lashed to the leader adorning my classic Leonard flyrod, Gordon’s Quill produced two much better than average size brown trout on day zero of my personal calendar countdown, a perfect beginning to my Catskill dry fly season! Could that be anything but magic?

I owe much to Mr. Gordon and his Quill. One preserved from his own vise has long been an inspiration to me.

Gordon’s canted wing style intrigued me, particularly as his followers who popularized the Catskill school of fly tying remained steadfast with the upright divided wing style. Gordon tied dry flies both ways, though he wrote that he thought the single canted wing produced the best imitation of the naturals. After nearly twenty years of experimenting with the single canted wing, I am convinced he was correct in his opinion.

Indeed, Mr. Gordon has been a major influence on many of us enthralled by the magic of a trout and a mayfly, fueling our own best efforts to intercede in their dance. Tying a half dozen classic Gordon Quills is my transition from this season unto the next. I welcome December and the commencement of my winter fly tying, the long months of study and thought, hoped to bring me to a greater understanding of that magic ballet, new insights which we all seek as spring brings warmer days and warmer waters!

Welcome to December, where winter shall officially begin, if November’s snow squalls and twenty-something lows managed not to convince anyone.

Last night some 39 members of the Catskill Fly Tyers Guild met via Zoom to tie the late Jimmy Deren’s early season Catskill fly known as the 50 Degrees. The evening featured a variety of good-natured banter as usual, while any attendees who wished tied a few flies in the comforts of their own benches. I tied one of the Deren patterns myself, before wandering down another path of Catskill history.

While talking about the specified dubbing mixture of “muskrat, with a little brown” Seth Cavaretta mentioned the fly was similar to the Dark Hendrickson, which got me to thinking about sage tyer Harry Darbee’s version of same. Harry specified the fur as “brown and gray fox” and I had made myself a supply during a previous winter, taking the brown fur from the legs of a Red Fox pelt with it’s medium gray underfur for a ride in the coffee grinder. I had used a bit of that same brown fox leg fur to mix for my 50 Degrees stash. Thus the mind wanders in winter and the fingers follow. For the rest of the meeting, my vise was turning out Darbee Dark Hendricksons.

Thinking about Harry’s pattern, I recalled the little brownish alternative Hendricksons I collected and matched a few Aprils ago. These flies appeared after the expected tannish size fourteen flies had been on for a few days, copied on a size 16 hook, and displayed a delightful lightly creamed coffee brown color. I matched them with quill bodied CDC Duns and 100-Year Duns, taking some magnificent trout!

At one point in the evening’s conversation, one member hailed a newcomer whom it appeared was joining from a cabin somewhere in or very near these Catskill Mountains. It was suggested he stay and fish over the weekend, citing a 52-degree forecast. I observed that there would be no bugs and the trout would not rise. This morning the Beaver Kill flows at an ideal 543 cfs, lovely for wading and fishing if one ignores the sub-35 degree water temperature. Yes, dry fly season is over. The time has come to let our trout rest until recovered from the spawn. From my own decades of personal experience, there is no cold so numbing to both body and soul as a fifty-degree rainy day on the water can produce.

December, and it is better we sit back and enjoy the soothing effects of warmed Catskill bourbon and honey and wind the threads of next spring’s Gordon’s Quills and Hendricksons. We can dream a bit, beyond the months of ice and wind, on to blissful spring sunshine upon bright water!

On the weather map, it was nothing more than a thin line of white snaking along the border between New York’s Southern Tier and northern Pennsylvania. Here in Crooked Eddy the end of that line falls gently and turns our landscape white.

We expect no more than a dusting, though as near as Binghamton there are warnings for hazardous travel along the interstates. No worry for me, as I am tucked in here fighting a head cold, with no plans to travel further than the Town’s transfer station.

The Guild’s winter Zoom gatherings begin on Thursday evening, and I am hopeful that the coughing and hacking will subside by then. If not, perhaps a warmed combination of Catskill Bootlegger Bourbon and Falling Spring honey will soothe my throat sufficiently.

JA will reintroduce an old Jimmy Deren pattern to kick things off, and then the group will tie or not as they please and talk a bit about our season past. I will set aside some muskrat fur, Teal feathers and rusty dun hackle beforehand and see what I think of the old “50 Degrees”. The tale is that Deren, famed proprietor of New York City’s Angler’s Roost so named the fly as he had found it effective on Catskill rivers when the waters reached that prescribed temperature.

I expect I will defer to my own Catskill Adams when it comes to fishing. Natural Fox Squirrel fur provides a mixed gray and brown coloration along with the black and tan barred guard hairs to produce a rougher, spiky body. Teal flank feather wings provide the bold black and white wing barring and is more durable and more Catskill, and I dearly love Cree hackle!

I do enjoy tying the classic Catskill patterns though. While looking through a can filled with decades worth of dubbing blends the other day I found the bag of special dubbing for the Davidson Special. Guild member Seth Cavaretta carefully researched the late Mahlon Davidson’s methods and, with the able assistance of Dave Catizone, dyed some cream fox fur with willow bark to produce a good supply of this pale green fur. He was kind to bring a large amount to a Guild meeting and offer some to all present. I look forward to shedding this fog in my head and trying my hand at this old classic!

Mahlon Davidson was a gifted Catskill fly tyer, and obviously had high regard for this particular coloration. I do not believe he recorded it as having been tied for a specific hatch, though it seems to be an ideal imitation for the Green Drake to me. When I sit down to tie it, I will have long shank size 8 and 10 hooks at the ready!

Before the bright glow of sunshine was hidden by the gray of winter skies, I set out for a riverwalk today. Too much time indoors this week had left my muscles tight and my joints stiff, and I sought to remedy that.

I felt but a little of that sun’s warmth. With a cold crosswind cutting through, I pulled the hood of my down jacket up overtop the wool baseball cap.

The walk along the river is my therapy during the long Catskill winter season. It gives me some time near bright water to be alone with my thoughts, and they are often thoughts of warmer days, of dappled sunlight kissing each riffle and pool.

I can feel the cut of a cold North wind as I make the turn at the end of the public road, always wishing I had leave to continue southward, on down to Junction Pool and the beginnings of the wide Delaware. Heading back into that wind I snug the zipper on my jacket and dip my head.

I am sitting on a grassy bit of riverbank, quietly watching the pool beyond for some evidence of life out there in the lingering morning mist. There is an old rod propped against a clump of that grass, a rod much older than I. It is a Catskill rod by birth, one from the old Leonard shop to the southeast, the Mills’ family’s gift to the working man. It is a rod made to the most famous taper known along these rivers, the classic 50 DF, and with the four-weight line strung through her guides she is simply perfection.

For the past half an hour, a few gentle yellow mayflies have drifted past my watch post, no more than one every ten minutes perhaps, but that is all it takes to bring my reverie to an end and focus all of my concentration on the wide currents in the foreground. Twenty minutes on there are enough flies to count, and at last a soft but significant ring along the shade line cast by an ancient sycamore.

I walk down the bank and slip into the water so the current will carry my wavelets downstream well below that rise. I have seen that ring once more, my better vantage allowing that there is a wide, soft bulge in the surface just as the ring appears. In ten minutes, I have moved a dozen steps, and the third bulge and ring lies fifty feet away.

The line lays on the water in soft coils until the easy urging of the old rod pulls it up into the air on my back cast. One false cast aimed well downstream of the rise, a few more coils of line lifted as another back cast extends, and then line, leader and fly are willed to that certain line of drift, two feet up current from the faint trace of receding ripples that mark the trout’s lie.

At the bulge I tense, then hold for one count as the fly slips out of sight, and then the rod comes up in a terrible arc and the Hardy screams as he streaks away! If I could, I would hold that moment suspended in time, treasure it and the feeling invoked as the trout’s adrenaline becomes my own.

He is a fine brown trout, long and wide and beautiful, and he battles the straining rod with all of his wild energy. My rush of emotion grows as his slowly ebbs, until it climaxes in the folds of the net. The hook slips free, and he slides back to the cold caress of the river as the smile on my face blossoms in the sun.

Another of many days that I will feel that cutting wind upon my face as I turn toward home. Five, six months? Nature alone knows how many days will pass before I once more sit quietly in the grass and watch the silken flow of bright water in hope of a subtle ring…