Garth and I found ourselves wandering around CT late on New Years Day. It was a dreary, grey, and damp day, though exceptionally warm for the 1st of the year. The morning had featured that dangerous sort of pea-soup fog, fog so thick it soaked clothing. That had lifted but was only replaced by thick grey stratiform clouds. Front passage was not predicted until early morning, so I knew warmth would hold well into the night. We fished through the daylight without any notable success, but I was not done when the sun set. I had an idea, a spot I wanted to try.
I'd started to rethink where wild trout might move throughout the season the year before. Brook trout have a long history of success even under extreme anthropogenic pressure. They managed to survive through the near complete deforestation of New England, and even now, though very notable declines have been documented, they persist in river systems that are often very impaired. One of a fish's methods for surviving a cataclysmic event is to run away from it. To persist, brook trout have to have moved around a lot. And they must still do so, right? This would explain why I was sometimes finding stretches of river that I knew with certainty held salmonid populations to be completely void of them during certain time periods.
Winter is, in some ways, a potentially deadly time for a salmonid. Ice and food availability are the biggest threats. What makes those threats null? The presence of deep, food rich water. The previous winter I'd devoted some time to exploring a few streams that emptied into significant wetlands with unsatisfactory results. One stream produced fish, but not as many as I knew it should. Another dealt me more than one skunking. Though I was unable to revisit them in the spring, one observation gave me a hunch. Noah and I stopped briefly one day at a spot within one of the wetlands, where the braided swampy stream was briefly constricted and deepened. We saw a school of brook trout, surprisingly large brook trout, in this deep elongated pool.
This was a spot that had been surveyed via electrofishing before, and when I looked back at the data what I'd remembered had not been wrong. No brook trout had been present at the times it was sampled. Those surveys were performed in the summer. Brook trout, particularly large brook trout, are far more reliant on a varied habitat than we give them credit. A stretch of stream might provide ideal spawning gravel but minimal cover or food during low water. A swamp might be too warm in the summer but provide refuge and readily available food in the winter. A stretch of pocket water may remain well oxygenated in summer but be choked in with anchor ice in the winter. Many fish need an interconnected mosaic of habitat to be successful, and their movements throughout these zones are often fairly predictable. That doesn't always work for angling, though. I can't count the places I still ask myself "where the hell do these fish go?". Sometimes you just can't find them. That doesn't mean they are all dead or something, they're either just not where you're looking or their behavior is making them less than receptive to your angling strategies. Just down the road from the spot Noah and I saw the brookies was a near identical if not more impressive pool in and arm off the same system. I've still yet to encounter a fish in that one and I just don't know why. I may well never.
This time though, I'd cracked part of the code. Garth and I pulled into a parking spot near the swamp hole and then waited a while. We hadn't been able to avoid hitting the water with our headlights so I wanted to rest it to have the best shot. A while late, we quietly approached the water. I covered the same 10 square feet of the near-still hole, often retrieving the fly over the same water three times consecutively. There was, at one point, a barely perceptible swirl on the fly. Then, a few minutes later, one of the brook trout I knew must be there revealed itself. She wasn't as big as I know is possible, but at a foot long this is a great CT native char, and one caught in complete darkness, in January, on a mouse.
Thinking I had it absolutely pinned I decided to take Garth to two nearly identical spots to try to repeat the success. It didn't work at all we found no more fish. I think I know why but I'll leave that for another day.
There are two takeaways for this, in my opinion: fish catching survey methods, be it angling, netting, or electrofishing, provide tiny slices of the pie. They can be incredibly helpful in determining if fish are present, but are very unreliable for determining whether a fish species isn't present. They just may not be present exactly when and where the sampling took place.
And of course, if you're not catching fish, they may legitimately not be there at the moment. No amount of fly changes, strategies, or approaches will change your success if all the fish you're targeting are two miles away. Sometimes you need to think outside the box, and by box I mean the "fishiest" looking water. Fly fisherman in particular aren't always the best judge of productive trout water, often because the gravitate to the "pretty" stuff. Not all trout water fits the classic, tumbling freestone or manicured, grassy spring creek stereotype. Some of it is really muddy, slow, and has brush around that is so thick you'd think no living creature could penetrate it and reach the water itself, and that shreds expensive waders with ease. Even if you manage to get to the water, conventional fly cast strategies simply will not do the job. But that might be where the fish are, depending on the season.
Until next time,
