I sat one recent early summer eve on the edge of a back channel of the Farmington River, patiently waiting for the bugs to get more plentiful while watching cedar wax wings flit around high in the sycamores and American red start shoot out to nab the trickle of light cahills that were already coming off. I've been reacquainting myself to a regular pattern of daytime fishing on the Farmington, a river for which there is little loved lost from this angler. I don't love that place the way I once did... the crowds, the clique scene of anglers, and the overly excessive percentage of larger stocked fish wore me down to where I just didn't have the interest at all anymore. But it has perhaps quieted down a tad in the last couple years and I needed to remind myself that I know how to enjoy trout fishing and can still get away from the crowd. Trout fishing is the only fishing I actually care to do on my own time with regularity anymore. I don't have the time to pursue the dwindling number of big striped bass, carp are what I fish with most of my clients, and I've seen so, so many bass. I really just want to fish light, simple, and very traditionally. I haven't even touched a streamer in a month. It's just dries and wets for me these days.
This day, particularly, it had been a wet fly day. I had been working on the river before, a trip with fellow former striped bass guide Kalil who is just a gem of a person. I've had the pleasure of guiding him twice and both were excellent days. This particular one he'd taken some good fish on a swung leadwing coachman in relatively shallow, slick water under a high bright sun. The takes were jarring and the fish strong, the water still a very happy 58 degrees at the time even well below the dam.
As I waited for the invaria hatch I expected to trickle off in that run as the sun set, I began to bore a little of the sitting and the birds... I'd given them more than an hour of my time already and my ass was a bit tired of the gneissose rock chair I'd chosen. So I secured a little partridge and hare soft hackle to my tippet and stood up to swing the head of the run.
It wasn't long before there was a nice sharp pluck at the und of my line as the fly crossed a seem and a spritely little wild brown trout hooked itself. It was the most modest of fish, but handsome nonetheless, and I lifted it by the fly and let it wriggle off of his own accord. When I started fishing this river I was very pleased with a fish like this. In fact, I split my time between fishing large streamers looking for the biggest brown trout and fishing like I was this time, targeting wild brook trout. Wild brookies used to be far, far more prevalent in the river than they are today. I still find pockets of five to ten inch wild trout in the same places I used to catch brook trout but they are now almost always just brown trout through much of the length of the river. That isn't to say there aren't still little pockets of brook trout; it just isn't the way it was a decade ago and I think the fishery is the worse for it.
Continuing down, I picked off another little brown. This one was a little fatter than the first and did a lot of jumping, which had me thinking it may actually be a precocious Atlantic salmon parr or perhaps and smolt.
Over the next half hour I picked off a few more similarly sized fish and was happy as a clam with the way I used my pre-hatch time. I knew I'd get shots at bigger fish as darkness fell and I wasn't really pressed about it. That felt good. I've put a lot of pressure on myself to catch more fish or catch bigger fish over the years. Right now, I barely care to catch fish at all... but if I have to this is how I want to do it. Simply and on my own terms, with things that actually look like insects.
