Home River Parts Unknown

My home river is the place I learned how to read moving water. It's where I first started lifting rocks and looking at what was living on and under them in terms of fish food. It was the first place I caught a wild trout, then the first place I caught a wild trout over 20 inches. I've gotten to watch my home river change over the eight years or so I've known it, and I've had to deal with some heartbreak on it as much as I have triumph. Though it isn't the closest body of water to where I live, it's where I feel most at home. But of the many fishable miles of my home water, there are stretches I visit very infrequently, and even parts, as much as half of it, that I have never made a cast into at all. On the river I know better than any other, there are still stretches that I don't know at all. Some will stay that way, I have no intention of casting into every pocket or pool or standing on every bit of bank. I believe I owe it to the stream that has given me everything to leave some places untouched. But there are parts of it that I either haven't fished much or haven't fished at all. One of them, above my favorite stretch, I call "The Unknown". It is a messy, tangled stretch of water a mile long, some small parts of it I have fished a time or two, others I haven't even seen. The river's character is different here, the substrate and structure not what is is downstream, nor the forest around it. Whereas below is healthy mixed forest with lots of hemlock and big old oaks, upstream is all hardwoods with dense undergrowth at its thickest right along the stream. Long, flat, deep pools with short runs and pocket water stretches in between also contrast from the water below where the largest pool is more like a big pocket.

The fishing is unquestionably harder here too, in part because the structure both demands long, gentle casts and forbids the angler from actually being able to do that sort of thing. What I really ought to do is bring a light spinning outfit into this stretch of river. Adding to the difficulty is a dramatic lack of fish. There is more insect life and bait fish in The Unknown, and lots of good holding water, but it suffers from being closer to stocking points than the stretch I prefer to fish. My home water really taught me how destructive stocking can be. When I started fishing it I needed to fish no more than half a mile in a day to catch a very solid number of wild fish. When I started fishing it, it hadn't been many years since a fish migration barrier on the lower end had been altered allowing stocked trout from downstream the ability to move up. There were already stocked trout making there way downstream from miles above at three other stocking locations, so now the stream's wonderful wild trout population was getting sandwiched. Since I started fishing here, I've watched the range in which wild brown and brook trout are most abundant shrink and move upstream little by little. Now, starting from where I nearly always do when I fish my home river, I may fish a half a mile of river before I even catch the first wild brown, and the wild brookies are all but completely extirpated. There are undoubtedly some other factors at play, but it's hard to deny that the stocking surpasses the natural biomass, and the stockers, which average a little larger than the wild browns and much bigger than the brookies, put undue strain on the population. And then, being ill adapted to live in the wild, they die either in the summer or the winter. Putting more fish in this river has resulted in fewer trout year round and even fewer trout overtime as anglers are less and less inclined to fish out the stockers from the pools they're dumped in on opening day, letting them take over other parts of the stream until the die. I look back at every stocked trout I've released that I legally could have removed from this stream as a failure on my part to protect the river I care most about. The Unknown has been getting infiltrated by more hatchery trout far longer than the two miles of water below, so it just doesn't yield the same number of wild trout. I can count the number of wild trout I've caught here on one hand. Actually, I can count it with only one finger. And, spoiler alert, my most recent visit did not change that although I managed to avoid skunking.

Despite the low yield, high frustration character of The Unknown, I've become more attracted to it for one specific reason. I've learned over the last few years that in any give river it is the stretches with the fewest wild trout that hold the largest wild trout. Though I haven't encountered another brown over 20 in my home water since Grandfather, if there is anywhere that is likely to be hiding another, it is this overall really unappealing stretch of water. Even if it doesn't hold any big wild trout, I owe it to myself to fish something on my home river that I don't know yet, something I'm not as comfortable with. I'll leave a lot untouched, but I want to know as much as I can. So, though it won't be this winter because the place freezes and there isn't anywhere I'd rather be casting to small stream wild browns in December and January when the conditions are right than the other parts of this stream, when bugs start getting active and chances of find the larger fish rising to paraleps or hendricksons improve, I will be there. I might even be there to catch the fish nobody thought of, where nobody goes.

Until next time.

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Chris, Brandon, Christopher, and Shawn for supporting this blog on Patreon.