June Guiding Updates & Patreon Setlist

 May was a productive month with clients with a decent array of variety and some big fish here and there! Of course, it always is, May is one of those months in Connecticut when it is pretty hard to pick what exactly to do any given day, for my own personal fishing. I did no trout trips at all in April but had a few in May, starting with Frank and Brandon. It was a mixed bag day, mostly nymphing, one cool spot and stalk with a dry, and a nice tiger trout on a mouse. Then David and Kalil came down from Massachusetts for a great day with a lot of catching shotgun nymphing the riffles of one of Connecticut's more underrated trout rivers. 

Kalil Boghban Photo

Kalil Boghban Photo

The carp spawned in bursts throughout the month, not always in the same places on the same days. The only time it pretty much screwed me was when I had Tom Cole out, and in unusual form two fish were hooked and lost out of the only feeders we found. Carp don't often come unpinned after they're suck, and I saw that both weren't fouled very early on. At least the fish viewing that day was spectacular, with hundreds upon hundreds of carp of all shapes around us, under us, even splashing us at almost all times.

The next day I had Blake, who coincidentally had a similar situation when he booked me last year, where every hooked fish managed to slip away un-netted. This time was different with multiple large carp and plenty of channel catfish caught. Most exciting, though, was this gorgeous little mirror carp!

Also getting in on the carp success in May was Michael, with his largest freshwater fish on the fly....

... and Dar, with some excellent big lake action.

To keep the variety up, shad were also heavily in the program this May. I love American shad, but for my own devices I'd gladly go make one annual pilgrimage a year for the species. Sometimes clients pull me out for them though, as Jeff and Tony did this year. For two days we slugged it out with rain and cooling temperatures. It was harder work than I like shad fishing to be but fish were caught regardless.

I'm skipping a fair bit, here, so as not to crowd out this post too much, but it was a great month with great clients and lot of good fishing. On to June, which we are now almost halfway into. I'm going to get a little bit personal, now. The start of this month has been a disaster for me. With some very expensive and necessary repair investments done on my generally trusty set of wheels, I promptly got into a car wreck that has left me with both light physical strain, significant mental trauma and stress, and a financial burden that is turning out to be far worse than it even seemed it might be initially. This has left me in a tough place for June. If you are looking to book a trip, please understand that it my take me some effort in scheduling. Walk and wade trips will be much, much easier to accomplish than canoe or raft trips, though I can at least do canoe trips here and there, it'll just take some scheduling and working things around to make sure I can borrow appropriate wheels. Because I am in such a sticky financial situation I very much would appreciate any trips I can get on the books at all, as this is setting me back on a few things I'd intended to do this year, including getting a second raft which would have hugely boosted my ability to furnish fun and exciting float trips. If you can find room in your schedule and any of my normal early summer warmwater fare- (bass, carp, bowfin, catfish) or saltwater species (scup, fluke, blackfish, stripers), as well as wade trips on the Farmington and a handful of other rivers remaining cool enough for trout -appeals to you, I'd be massively appreciative of your booking. I can't promise the easiest scheduling process but will do my absolute best. Thank you for your understanding while I work this out. 

So far this month the fishing has been good and promises to continue being. Some bowfin, catfish, and carp have found their way to the net. I did something I don't usually do much anymore and made some casts at carp one day, resulting in the largest fantail I've ever personally set eyes on. It ate the fly before it made it to the bottom on a fast cruise in clear water. It was a spectacular eat and in many respects on of the best carp I'd ever caught... so no complaints there.

Levi Opsatnic Photo

As for Patreon, we're already on a nice roll this month. Here's the setlist: 

Cow+ Posts: 

Get In Loser, We're Going Gar-ing

Videos: 

Multidisciplinary Smallmouth Nymphing

Casting Under & Into Brush

Weekly Posts:

Surface Analysis

Thing Carp Eat Sometimes

Using Soft Glass to Set Hard

Stand In Cold Water

Quick Tips:

TBD

Walt's Durability

Walt's Profile

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Franky, Geof, Luke, Noah, Justin, Sean, Tom, Mark, Jake, Chris, Oliver, oddity on Display, Sammy, and Cris & Jennifer, Hunter, Gordon, Thomas, Trevor, Eric, Evan, Javier, Ryan, Dar, Eric, and Collin for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog and access more informative content, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version!

Snorkel Fishing the Straight of Hormuz

 First on the docket for Noah and I one mild mid spring day was a stop to a dive shop, because he needed more weights. The man had just purchased his first wetsuit, and I'd already made myself a side character in his quest to get really good at catching fish while in the water with them. We'd done this before about two years ago, and we could kind of see the potential then but somehow didn't really take it as seriously as we should have. Now, though, Noah was dead set on becoming some sort of marine mammal... a seal-man, if you will. Though my time was a bit too occupied with teaching other people how to stab carp in the face with tiny feathered weapons, I wanted to take part in this process as much as possible. And so off we were headed to buy lead to sink Noah. Part of free diving is fighting both your own buoyancy and that of a wetsuit, weight belts with weight proportional to your own body mass help make reaching depth and staying down possible without unnecessarily fighting. From the dive shop it was back to Noah's, where we had to hook up the boat. His landlord was there doing some cleaning up around the property

"Hey Noah, how are you?" I hard him ask, to which Noah responded "Not bad, just taking the boat out today". His landlord responded "just stay away from the Straight of Hormuz". Inaudibly to both in the truck, I quietly snorted a laugh. When Noah hopped back in I turned to him and asked if he knew any good launches on the straight. We set off; not for Iran, Oman, or the UAE, but southeastern Connecticut instead, intent to ignore wars that shouldn't be happening in the cool embrace of clear, man made lake waters filled with a mix of mostly non-native species. 

At the launch we spent maybe as much as an hour fiddling with equipment, culminating with the motor refusing to start, forcing us to operate solely off of the trolling motor. This wasn't really what we wanted out of the day, ideally, but it was vaguely functional. we made our way to the nearest rocky reef surrounded by deeper water; an ideal setup for snorkel fishing. I was un-wet-suited and just there as a spotter, basically, though I had a couple fly rods and would make some casts as I moseyed around the periphery of Noah's dive fishing and made sure he didn't kill himself somehow. 

Snorkel and dive fishing isn't an entirely un-tried strategy, but it is very close to it. Most people, when prompted, are pretty baffled by the logistics of going into the water with a hook and line, swimming right up to your query, and trying to feed them and will just assume you are spear fishing. That, of course, is illegal in inland waters. There is basically zero information to come upon when it comes to underwater hook and line angling. Just a handful of videos here and there and whatever you can glean from spear fishing that couple be applicable. So, Noah is very much in untested territory here... or uncharted waters, if you will. To him- or really to the both of us -that is a hugely enticing proposition. The opportunity to learn more about the species we target, learn new ways to catch them, and get to observe and document more about their habitat and behavior without the aid of any tech like drones, forward facing sonar, or underwater cameras. We'd just figure it out with what our bodies were physically capable of. There are plenty of people that have done snorkeling to observe fish, and quite a few that have done it while people actively fished to the fish they were observing. There are far, far fewer that have meshed the two together in a comprehensive way. 

I motored around circles while Noah went down, scoured for fish, and occasionally came up with one. Had we just anchored off a ways we may have hooked more than he was doing. The notable advantage of angling from in the water and up close is that you can pick out the ones you really want to catch with exceptional ease... if your target is to catch sunfish, you can pick out the largest, the prettiest, or that crazy hybrid. Fewer fish with sore lips is never a bad thing in my opinion. But how would larger, more generally considered difficult species go? 

At one point Noah came up to the surface and I heard a muffled scream through his snorkel. He's hooked a decent largemouth and was being forced to give chase rather than break off (an issue he has since rectified, but it was a funny thing to have to "be the drag" on this occasion). Watching your wetsuit-clad buddy give chase to a bass underwater is just hysterical. Even funnier still, watching lake home owners react to seeing him pop up at random places out in the lake holding various fishes. We picked and poked a ways off of one particular shoreline finding bass and crappie. At one point I watched a smallmouth repeatedly jumping for a fully submerged Noah- a perspective that probably pales significantly in comparison from actually seeing the fish jump from below as Noah was in that moment. That is something we have got to catch on video at some point. 

I was picking off a few bass here and there, as well as one crappie and some sunfish. But Noah far outdid that, even in a scenario where I had great visibility and was mostly sight fishing. It is quite clear, and becoming more so, that snorkel fishing may at times be just flat out wildly more effective than fishing from above the surface. That's kind of crazy, given the limitations of having to be very close to the fish. Some of them just don't care, and some will even attack you. As far was the ones that do get spooked, we'll just figure it out, won't we? 

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Franky, Geof, Luke, Noah, Justin, Sean, Tom, Mark, Jake, Chris, Oliver, oddity on Display, Sammy, and Cris & Jennifer, Hunter, Gordon, Thomas, Trevor, Eric, Evan, Javier, Ryan, Dar, Eric, and Collin for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog and access more informative content, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version!

Vehemently Anti Crepuscular

 There are little things, little visual evidences, that pop up in our world to tell us how incredibly small we are. One such phenomena that has that effect on me is the appearance of anticrepuscular rays. See, the suns rays are parallel. It really, really doesn't feel like it, because the sun is so comparatively large and far away that the more common way we see rays of light from the sun- crepuscular rays -they appear to diverge from the source. 

This is a scale issue, though, of the same order that a road's painted lines appear to  get closer together the further away they are... it's just something we're much less familiar with seeing. Crepuscular rays are not remotely rare. They occur all the time when sun shine through clouds, leaves, or even sky scrapers in hazy conditions early or late in the day. The optical conditions that let those rays extend overhead are rarer, but they do occur. When they do, its spectacular.

Anticrepuscular rays occur when the suns ray are visible meeting again at infinity on the opposite wide of the sky from the sun. Very, very rarely, crepuscular rays meet anticrepuscular rays meet and span the whole sky, supposedly. I've never seen such an occurrence. One day in Florida, though, with the sun rising out over the Atlantic, I turned to the West and gasped at the sight of the best anticrepuscular rays I'd ever had the pleasure to see. It may seem a silly thing to feel small observing this, but in some sense this optical phenomena represents the scale of the light from our sun and the clouds in our atmosphere, going so far and visually spreading apart in such away that when you can see those rays on the other side of the sky, it looks like they just go on forever. 

That's pretty darned cool if you ask me. 

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Franky, Geof, Luke, Noah, Justin, Sean, Tom, Mark, Jake, Chris, Oliver, oddity on Display, Sammy, and Cris & Jennifer, Hunter, Gordon, Thomas, Trevor, Eric, Evan, Javier, Ryan, Dar, Eric, and Collin for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog and access more informative content, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version!

May Patreon Setlist

May is a month of much fishiness, and so will it be with the content over on Patreon....

Cow+ Posts: 

To Bead or Not To Bead

Crappie & Ramp Catch, Forage, and Cook

Videos: 

Casting With Slopes Behind You

Hunting Giant Fallfish

Weekly Posts:

Weather Analogs

Spinners or Duns?

Questioning Authority

Beast Fleye Simplification

Quick Tips:

TBD

Thanks as always to everyone that supports me over there! The link to Patreon is to the right of this post in the side bar, in web version; not mobile. 

Spring Highlights, Updates & Guiding Schedule

 This has been quite a whacky, wild, rollercoaster ride of a spring thus far. The weather has been pretty much bananas, with wild temperature swings and swaps back and forth between dry conditions and more normal, wet spring weather as well. The fishing has been more hit than miss, though by my personal standards it has been a bit frustrating. In terms of prolonged flooding, this spring has been a bit of a dud. The Connecticut is still up currently but did not get all that high for all that long. Turns out, and average snowpack in CT, below in most of MA, and average in VT and NH coupled with a quick early melt in March and inconsistent rains in early April do not make for the perfect floodplain season. This doesn't ruin the carp fishing, but it does deprive me of some of my favorite spots for one season. Believe it or not the lack of flooding has bigger ramifications for my early season smallmouth fishing, which was good but not great this year. The bigger impacts on carp fishing quality came from the temperature swings and wind. There were a lot more one and two fish days than I typically like, but my standards for carp fishing are also pretty high anyway. Here are some highlights....

The first properly netted fish (we had one throw the hook and get out an hour prior) of the season was Dar's big and super long barble-d fantail. Not a bad way to start. For a couple weeks he'd be the only one putting fish in the net, including on a couple good high numbers days (9 one day, 7 another.) 

Most difficult conditions bested goes to Ben, he got a modest wind one day then and absolute howler the next with fish in a very neutral mood, but still managed to put good carp in the net. 

 Weirdest catch goes to Dar with a one-eye blind common on his 6th session with me this spring. Again, fish were in a neutral mood this day after a very cold night, it was a tricky bite. 

Mike picked a day perfectly, as the air temperature sky rocketed and fish went into a very aggressive feeding mode, he ended up with a perfect bunch of commons, mostly bubblers. 

The next day Joey stole the title for most fish landed with a perfect dozen, mostly scrappy mid sized commons with one epic little fantail for variety. The fish began early spawning activities that day but most were still feeding. 

Spawning behavior made things trickier for the Idaho guides team of Jack and Luke, but Luke managed his first carp- a beautiful slot machine bubbler fantail -then another perfect common. Jack fooled a fantail on day one and a monster common for the flooded woods on day two. Jack has managed to bring the big fish luck two years in a row, tow commons early in 2025 were some of the biggest floodplain fish I've ever netted and his fish this year was no different. You know they're big when holding them up off your knee makes your arms shake instantly.

As for smallmouth, both Dar and Dave caught their personal biggest with me this season, and Art got the job done with some aggressive chasers. 

My schedule has a few holes I can fill in the coming week or so, the water is still up and the carp are still back in the woods for now. If we get rain enough, this can persist well into May, but that isn't particularly likely this year in my opinion. So we're likely to transition into my typical flats and river edge late spring and summer fishing, which is still very engaging and in my opinion does offer shots at some much larger fish. We're also coming into prime time for post spawn pike, smallmouth streamer trips, and soon enough, bowfin. I've been seeing a few bowfin already but none have stuck around long enough to provide shots. Soon, though, they'll be all sorts of rowdy. Flows remain fairly amicable for trout float trips in the larger rivers and any shots of rain could put the Salmon, Willimantic, and others in play as well. I have to keep a couple fairly large blocks of time open in early May, but I do have availability in the latter half of the month. June only has a handful of booked dates and is primo for anything and everything on the warmwater front as well as Farmington floats when flows allow. Let me know if anything piques your interest! 

brwntroutangler@gmail.com 

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Franky, Geof, Luke, Noah, Justin, Sean, Tom, Mark, Jake, Chris, Oliver, oddity on Display, Sammy, and Cris & Jennifer, Hunter, Gordon, Thomas, Trevor, Eric, Evan, Javier, Ryan, Dar, Eric, and Collin for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog and access more informative content, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version!