And so, a new year begins as the old one departs. There is bright sunshine this morning to belie the air temperatures in the teens. Wind driven air strafes the Catskills, such that a walker determined to enjoy it’s freshness must brave single digit wind chill. I can hear that wind howling past the window above my fly-tying bench.

My inspiration this day was tied to the hoped for early spring hatches, Epeorus and Ephemerella, the Quill Gordons and Hendricksons. I wound soft hen hackles around the dubbed thoraxes bunched just behind the eyes of heavy wet fly hooks, flies to probe the riffles on those cold, windy days of searching to find the forerunners of the hatch.

Blasphemy you say, for a brother of the dry fly, but not if they are fished in the film! There it is hoped the motion of those soft, sparse hackles might tempt a trout still too aware of winter’s lethargy to sample a bit of life riding high on the surface.

I have friends who chose soft hackles and spiders first and foremost, and I always mean to give these flies their chance. They do find their way to my cast, though not nearly as often as their history might deserve. The dry fly is a stern master, particularly in a season where hatches are terribly sparse, thus I think once more of expanding my repertoire and easing my self-discipline. Should I find myself giving as many hours to sitting and waiting as last season forced upon me, these flies deserve a few casts to ease the mental anguish of my endless waiting!

These months are the bowels of winter. January and February rarely bring respite in these mountains. I have enjoyed it once in seven seasons, two or three days when a wisp of warmer southerly air teamed with distant rays of sunlight to urge river temperatures to flirt with spring levels! I chose the perfect hour of the perfect day and brought leviathan to hand. I still wonder if such a February afternoon will be a once in a lifetime Catskill experience.

I ponder the making of a few more flies, whether to complete the first dozen of the New Year on the first day, or wait for another burst of inspiration. Perhaps I will decide, after lunch…

Indeed, that is the single question that taunts fly fishers and fly tyers. Many have theorized for answers for at least the past couple of centuries, and many believe we have found those answers. The catch is, and always will be that none of us know!

I wish I had had a steady platform to take that photo, for it’s sharpness of focus and minute detail suffers from the motion of the drift boat in the current. Those little grayish blurs are tiny olive mayflies you see, perhaps size 20 or 22. There is just enough clarity to tell that some are sitting tall with their wings upright, while others are in various postures, some struggling to remain afloat, others possibly crippled by incomplete emergence. There is no way to tell though, which one sparked the soft, dimpling rise of a large wild brown trout there in the margins of the West Branch Delaware.

The second shot is older, and the camera of lesser quality, but I was wading and thus standing steadily along the riverbank. The Hendricksons are considerably larger mayflies too, a size 14, thus it is easier to see that most are floating with their wings upright, but a few are partially submerged and or struggling. These flies are drifting right along the bank. Out further, where the currents are stronger, faster and more variable, there were considerably more flies struggling with their emergence and drift.

The fairly conventional wisdom of selectivity as to which specimens the trout choose to take is based upon logical thinking: the flies that are encumbered or incompletely emerged are more likely to be taken for the trout sense that they cannot escape. I have touched on the recent book of two English chalk stream anglers, Peter Hayes and Don Stazicker who have performed a great deal of work with high speed photography and videography to prove that theory. As much as their body of work supports that conventional belief, even they cannot know what motivates the trout, and that is right at the heart of the magic we seek to immerse ourselves in when we wade into bright water with a fly rod in hand!

Consider the scene of that second photo above, taken on a darker, damp afternoon on the West Branch Delaware. The density of the flies on the water is obvious, and that density continued up and downstream and fully across the river as far as I could see. Thousands of mayflies, whether physically encumbered or not were staying on the surface for long, long drifts of fifty feet or more. No trout rose to meet them. Would not logical thinking demand that such abundance coupled with atmospheric conditions keeping flies drifting upon the surface, produce widespread feeding?

The subsurface fishers were not catching any trout on this afternoon either, and there were plenty of anglers plying various methods. Have you ever spent a day on the West Branch Delaware during the Hendrickson hatch? Solitude is not part of the occasion I assure you. The trout were simply not feeding. Puzzles like this remain, and I for one am very happy that they do, for challenge is the very essence of the game!

Too much emphasis is placed upon the idea of catching every trout in the brook. When was the last time you viewed an advertisement for any fly or tackle item that failed to promise you would “catch more fish”? I fear that mentality causes thousands who try fly fishing to abandon it without ever appreciating the challenge and the magic of bright water.

When I owned and operated a fly shop years ago, I often had a number of opening day trout fishers stop in looking for bait and spinning lures. Among them there were several who loved to brag about catching their limit of trout as quickly as possible and going home early. The saddest thing to me was to hear them teach their kids that this was the goal of trout fishing. I see fly fishers that seem to think the same way these days, and it saddens me.

If you are a newcomer to fly fishing, I hope whoever starts you along the path instructs you in the value of patience and observation and teaches you to appreciate the magic and wonder that is the essence of any activity in Nature. If you happen to walk the opposite bank, and have rushed along every river you have visited and spent a fortune on each new tackle item which claimed to be the answer, I hope that you stop and consider that fishing is not a competition, it is a meditation.

Between watching the snowflakes fall and shoveling our way to freedom, my annual milepost has slipped behind me. One hundred days represents the long down slide from winter to the angler’s spring, the beginning, or at least the fervent, daily hope for it, of another dry fly season on these beloved Catskill rivers. Today is day ninety-nine…

Though this run of winter days will be more than three months long, it is a season of hope for the snowbound angler. There will be more snow to be sure, but we will greet it as replenishment for the rivers born on these mountains. No doubt many of these days will be frigid, days when we gather close to fireplace, stove or heater, but we will tie our flies and oil our reels and think of sunshine!

It will be less than two weeks from today when the Catskill Museum will reopen for fly tyers to gather on Saturdays. Our Catskill Fly Tyers Guild will be well represented, and tyers of all skill levels are welcome to join us to share and learn and socialize.

Looking further ahead, the Guild will soon be planning our featured winter event: Fly Fest 2026!

We shall all be watching the weather during the countdown, eager for a chance to cheat winter and slip out to bright water and feel the comfort of vintage cork between our fingers.

My own river legs get restless by March, when I will begin to head astream each day that Nature allows. There will always be dry flies in my vest, though only once in seven years has a trout risen during that third and often teasing month of the year!

If nothing else, March days are for watching river gages and water temperatures as I pray for those fifty magic degrees that signal the first spring mayflies. I’ll wander riverbanks when those gages surpass forty nevertheless, as the fever builds until that first cast to a rising trout!

Truth is, the Red Gods do not offer a steady rise in temperatures, no matter how badly we crave them. Waters will rise past forty-five under weak spring sunshine, only to drop with a fast-moving cold front back into the thirties. Sometimes the rivers spend weeks in that holding pattern of the mid-forties, and these are the times that madness seems near for the dedicated dry fly angler!

Spring comes in it’s own time: 100, 99, 98…

Funny sometimes how the media reports the weather. It has been pretty clear for several days that the Catskill’s belated Christmas gift would be the worst winter storm of the season. Rather than just give us the clear picture though, our local forecasts are saying three to five inches today, repeating three to five inches tonight. They seem to think it best to mediate the impact, separating the storm front into halves, rather than telling us straight out we are looking at six to ten inches (and maybe more…) of snow within less than twenty-four hours.

Is that presentation supposed to be good news for older residents like me? I mean, I will only have to shovel three inches or so, if I go out and do it in the middle of the storm. Yea, oh by the way, I will have to do it twice.

Some snowcap in the mountains will help the rivers, but I’d still prefer a warm, wet winter with plenty of rain. A growing snowcap after six weeks of on and off rainfall days would be ideal, for there would be good flow in all of our rivers when the coldest weather settled in. Good, steady flow cleans and protects the precious gravel and silt beds where the stream life grows. Low flows and extreme cold mean anchor ice, and the sparse hatches of the 2025 season more than demonstrated how devastating that can be.

Things could still work out. If that foot of snow up high melts slowly, the rivers will get a fairly constant dose of water. If the weather continues to bounce up and down though, all of it could come rushing down at the same time, just like our previous snowpack. Floods and freezes are the problem, steady replenishment of ground water, springs and surface flows is the solution.

There are a lot of people pointing fingers at who is responsible: scientists, conservationists, big business, politicians, you name it. I tend to think that a lot of our increasingly unfriendly weather patterns are part of a natural cycle, though it makes a great deal of sense to me that man’s pollution and destruction of our natural resources is making things worse. I hope we wake up and get past the blame stage and do something positive about the problem. Wild fish and wild water are my passion, and I truly wish to see them outlast my time here.

This morning’s strong winds have cleared much of the decorative snow from the trees, but a White Christmas is a certainty for these Catskills. It seems the reflective landscape will stay with us once more, as Friday’s prediction offers nearly seven inches of new snow!

Reality has been outperforming prognostication since our first winter snowfall, where “three inches” fell as six. I cleared three inches from last week’s “inch”, and four inches of yesterday’s “two”. I hope the trend declines abruptly in light of the 6.8″ I viewed for Friday, too much for an older angler to shovel.

Reading produced another idea which resulted in a trial modification of a pair of mayfly emergers. Among the unusual patterns in the Hayes & Stazicker tome released this year, there were some ideas for sinking the rear of such flies involving a material I have not used for more than a decade.

In the nineties, the twisted wire dubbing brush became a “thing” for a time, and I came across a couple of strands in a baggie marked “Rybarsky Sport, Fishing Sport, Angelsport” from the Czech Republic no less, acquired more than thirty years ago at the first Fly Tying Symposium. I set it aside for I had been interested by the aforementioned videographing Englishmen’s use of the material for a weighted trailing shuck, and finally pulled it out and tried the idea on my March Brown and Green Drake emergers this week.

I tried two different styles of hooks that I had in my larder, the local fly shop being closed for the season. A Core emerger hook in size 12 seemed a good base for the March Brown, while a longer partridge Klinkhammer hook (also a 12) offered an even better shape and the greater length required for the drake. I think the Klinkhammer style will be the best choice to keep everything but the wing and head of the fly beneath the film, but trials must of course wait until spring.

I have more of these dubbing brushes somewhere. Once I find them, a Hendrickson pattern will take shape at the very least. The material is suitably sized for larger mayflies, though I seem to recall some of these brushes were thinner than others. I believe the style would be good for the sulfur hatches on our tailwaters, at least for the larger, size 16 flies encountered in May, though finding the style of hook I want in the smaller size may be a challenge.

Perhaps I will find the brushes as I work my way through restructuring my tackle room, for a little fly tying would help pass the snowbound conditions to come!

One of the things I miss this time of year is the chance to go fishing. For many of my years in Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley, the limestone springs offered the chance to angle for a Christmas fish. A bright Falling Spring rainbow seemed the perfect emblem for this cheery time of year! During most seasons, the weather would be suitable in December, though having one of those milder days coincide with my time off required some luck.

During the fly shop years, I fished mornings during most of the year. I even landed my personal best rainbow on a frosty January morning while trying out a new Orvis demo rod on Falling Spring. The key was always sunlight! Though the aquatic weeds died back in winter, they did not vanish. Morning sunlight started photosynthesis, adding oxygen to the water, and that generally activated the stream life, including the trout. That five-pound rainbow was more than active, leaping and thrashing the weed beds as it fought to escape!

This looks to be the third extremely cold winter in a row, so any chance to wander bright water and swing a fly will truly be a divine gift. If the rivers remain icebound for short periods between thaws, a two or three day warming trend could find me haunting a tailwater…

I began my day with an old friend, wandering the timeless Beaver Kill with Dana Lamb…

This week I opened his first volume, “On Trout Streams and Salmon Rivers” to once more savor the highlights of my winter reading. We walked this morning the length of the Beaver Kill, dreaming of the rush of “red-letter days” and sobering over his laments. Lamb waded the greatest American trout river during the Golden Age, when gorgeous wild brown trout swam in all the pools from Turnwood to Peaksville, and he waded it still after World War II when automobiles and spinning rods brought throngs to the river to take every trout they might, and the angler’s solitude with them.

Remembering one pool during the halcyon days brought a knowing smile when he told just where he cast his “Fanwing”. Wild browns still abide there my friend, and on the right day perhaps a great one would come again to your favored Fanwing Royal!

There are still a great many anglers who flock to our most famous river, yet most seek the easy, cookie-cutter stockies that Lamb lamented. Few hunt the wild browns with devotion to the dry fly, and I rejoice in that, for it allows me to recapture something of the solitude he missed in those post-war years.

Along the route of his tour, he wrote that the “Acid Factory pool holds no charm for me and never has“, which brought my own earliest memories of the river to life. It was there that I found dozens of trout rising as the Shad Fly caddis boiled from the rushing flow. On my very first trip to the fabled Beaver Kill, it was I who had just the right fly! I remember most the fourteen-inch brook trout who demanded my best cast across the maelstrom before he deigned to take my fly. He was strong and darkly colored, and I still believe he was as wild as that water, having come down from Horton Brook to feed in the wealth of the big river! My hands shook when I turned out the fly and released him back to his kingdom.

Thirty-three seasons have passed since that day, nearly a third of a century, but I still feel the excitement of those first days each time I visit the river. Whether walking through time with Dana Lamb, or working out line amid the glimmer of spring sunlight, the Beaver Kill still captivates me, and always will!

I found the East Branch free of ice just now, running clear through Hancock and into Crooked Eddy, and I saw something else I did not expect. A solitary fly fisher stood in the frigid water beside the riffles, swinging a fly down through the deepening flow.

It was a sunny twenty-nine degrees when I left the house, and the river gage just upriver from that stoic figure reads thirty-three as I write this. I would say that, to express that fellow’s chances of catching a trout, one would be most accurate to delve into the negative numbers. Is this a sign of desperation? I think not.

I could not recognize anything familiar at my distance, nor did the truck parked nearby stir any remembrance. Might he be a local? Perhaps, though I have seen anglers travel here in all seasons.

It might be he is no more expectant of a catch then I would be, but simply an angler who feels the need to say farewell to the river on this bright, ice-free day.

We will have snow tonight and more tomorrow, so this may well be the last day this year will allow a man to stand in the moving current and cast a fly, to bid farewell to bright water and it’s magic until springtime.

I too have waded these rivers beneath winter skies. If the Red Gods choose to offer a milder season, I will search for the warmest water on a day blessed with sunshine. Our tailwaters may even surrender a trout when water temperature rises to 37 or 38 degrees. I know that the possibility exists on that kind of day, though I certainly know the difference between possibility and likelihood. I choose to wander rivers on many days when the best I will carry from the river will be contentment; appreciation for a few hours of solitude in one of my favorite places.

We are closing in upon the end of another year, though perhaps just two thirds through the breadth of another Catskill winter. Nature has provided a show this week, the landscape going quickly from white to dampened green amid a wink of sunshine, and back to white. Now too, the whiteness is diminished for the moment, soon threatened to return.

The Mother has brought water to the rivers once more, and for that I am eternally grateful, with hope the ice was stopped short of the sediment and the gravel.

The cold still reigns, the memories of bright moments with sunshine and warmer air still fresh as I seek the warmth of fleece and down. The trifling with tackle has begun. It stirs memories as it always does…

I made up a fresh batch of bamboo polish the other day. I have nursed a capful of the stuff my friend Dave provided for decades, and now I have perhaps a lifetime supply! The new batch was tested on my old Orvis 99, bringing a warm brown glow back to cane nearly as old as I am.

Winter days are scattered still at this season: a few hours of reading, a handful spent daydreaming memories, a quarter-dozen flies tied, perhaps a rod taken from it’s tube for cleaning, or maybe just to feel my fingers encircle it’s cork for a long moment. The tackle room was, adjusted; a new bamboo bookcase added after due consideration of location and the impact upon my crowded space. There are books upon it’s shelves, though not all that will be carefully determined to reside there. I am still a full week away from my annual countdown, the time when anticipation is allowed to formally begin.

Passing a Catskill winter, I work through many moods between November’s sense of loss and March’s feverish wont and anticipation. There are no hours to lose in the rod shop this winter, the advance of arthritis robbing me of the spark of making a second rod. No, more hours must be passed in the embrace of memory. Sixty years under the spell of waters, and still, I cannot exist without their magic!

One of the few fishable hatches I encountered during the 2025 season was the unique bright yellow March Brown mayflies that I had first witnessed six years ago. Those unnaturally bright hued flies could be best described as safety yellow and, since it was the fiftieth anniversary of Woodstock just down the road in Bethel, NY, I took to calling it the Woodstock March Brown.

Since some of those psychedelic mayflies survived last year’s devastating drought and frigid, low flow winter, I have some hope that they might appear again when May rolls around. That hope made them a candidate for imitation, and it was only a matter of time before my new transitional dun design caught up with these Hendrix inspired bugs.

Though the pale, dirty yellow, faded wing critters that seem to have replaced our traditional big, beautiful caramel colored Catskill March Browns are also smaller than those formerly abundant flies, the Woodstocks must be eating better, as they remain a hearty size 10! I set to work yesterday crafting a trio of the new patterns.

Wood duck flank tails and the wrapped pheasant tail abdomen are common to this new series of transitional duns. I chose fine gold wire for the rib, brilliant yellow silk dubbing for the thorax and a CDC puff wing with dark brown between fore and aft brighter yellow feathers. Legs are added with a few fibers of brown back feathers from a Hungarian Partridge.

I have used multiple colors of CDC for decades to mimic heavily mottled wings for mayflies like the March Browns and Green Drakes, finding it very effective. I will be anxious to try this one if the Woodstock bugs grace us with an appearance in 2026 as the brilliant psychedelic yellow color has proven to be a trigger.

We saw a bit of additional snow on Saturday night, perhaps two inches here in the Eddy, with hope the higher elevations received more. Last week’s predicted inch was three inches deep here, while friends on one of the mountains sheltering the West Branch reported seven inches. Later this week we are being teased with the promise of a couple of days in the forties, so there is hope for some high altitude melting and some sorely needed water in the rivers.

A warmup would be most welcome, as this is already shaping up to be a very cold winter, here in mid-December. Reservoir releases are fairly low, Pepacton at 74.6 cfs and Cannonsville at 149 though the latter was in the 300 cfs range a few days ago. All our rivers have ice along their edges and bank to bank through their slower reaches. Most gaging stations are iced, though Lordville on the mainstem is clear and reading a very low 753 cfs and a water temperature of 31.6 degrees Fahrenheit. A good bump in flows would be beneficial. Dare we hope for sunshine?

Early December, and the temperatures are flirting with zero! A degree or two above or below the mark, depending upon just where you are in the region, lows like this usually have a lot to do with elevation. We are not too high here at Crooked Eddy, just a few comfortable feet above river level, and I have one degree below zero right now, some five minutes after sunrise.

I took my first river walk of the season yesterday afternoon, finding the East Branch Delaware iced bank to bank at the eddy, though flowing beneath the railroad bridge and down past Fireman’s Park. I just checked the brand new USGS Hancock Gage (installed this summer) and water temperature was flatlined at the freezing mark. Flows are low again on all our rivers, something we anglers very much need to change.

If our hatches are going to get the chance to recover, we need a little warmup and some significant rain, soon!

I look at that photo, and I think about the inevitable changes in rivers. The trout is lying on river grass with current flowing through it, and that’s because I took that shot on one of three large grass islands that used to create some interesting fishing up at Stilesville on the West Branch Delaware. The lower island was just opposite the small DEC access area there, while the upper island lay opposite Laurel Bank Farm. We are talking something more than 21 years ago, in June.

Rains had muddied most of the Catskill rivers overnight, and the upper West Branch remained clear and perfectly wadable. There were a few caddisflies about, Psilotreta, the Dark Blue Sedge, and I had the pattern. I stalked an early morning sipping rise along the edge of one of the channels between those grass islands and took that twenty-inch brown on my slate gray X-Caddis. That would be the last time I fished those productive grass islands.

That September, while I was up north again and fishing several rivers, a fellow named Hurricane Ivan came calling on the last day of my trip. When he passed through Deposit, New York, he took those three big, beautiful grass islands with him. He did offer something in return, filling the deep, bouldery wild trout habitat that stretched from mid-river to the westerly bank with pea gravel, making featureless shallows where once giants dwelt.

Mother Nature seemed geared toward violent changes in those years, with three one-hundred-year floods and a five- hundred-year flood coming in the course of two years. Now the changes are subtler. Warmer, drier summers and colder low flow winters are not doing our Catskill rivers any favors, so I hope the tide turns. We have some truly wonderful fly fishing up here, not the shabby put and take mess that so many of our Eastern states offer, but highly challenging fishing for real trophy sized wild trout. The best of dry fly fishing continues here on the waters where it began in America. I for one, would like our next generation, and the generation after that one to be able to say that too!