Hiding in Plain Sight

There's something rather special about an urban wild trout stream, especially the ones barely anyone knows about. There are probably hundreds in the Northeast. Streams running along highways. Next to city parks. Right through people's backyards. There's trout there. There's also graffiti, road noise, and usually some litter. What attracts me to fish these streams? The counterintuitive nature of their existence, for one thing. Some have said that trout don't like in ugly places. Though beauty is subjective, that are certainly many that would call most of the urban trout streams I've fished ugly places. And they might be. But I find beauty in the fact that caddis, dace, midges, mayflies, suckers, and trout are perfectly capable of living so close to people if given half the chance. That, and I get some sort of weird satisfaction out of catching a wild brook trout living in a discarded bathroom sink.

Yesterday I fished new water, adding three new streams to my list, each deep within the urban jungle and all holding an extraordinary amount of life. The first stream was the only one I had serious questions about. I knew it could really only be a seasonal trout stream at best, having a top draw dam as it's source. But if it were seasonal there would most likely be trout in it this time of year looking to spawn in its numerous gravel filled tailouts. The first cast I made proved there were trout there as a substantial brown materialized and swiped at my fly before disappearing again and never returning. A few runs downstream a small brookie broke the skunk.

I eventually became frustrated with this little creek, being without waders and having exceptional difficulty navigating it. I moved on to the next, which made good of itself just as quickly. I missed a good trout that made far more attempts at my Ausable Ugly than made sense for a brown, but that is what it was. I would come back and dupe that fish one last time later. Moving upstream I found a very deep hole that would undoubtedly be holding a few fish. On the way up it produced a brookie. On the way down, two brown trout. 

Pressing on I began to see active redds. The first had one small female brookie with two males fighting over her. Another had a pair of browns, both over a foot long. I tried and failed to get into a good position to photograph either. The window to do so is closing rapidly too, which is a bummer. I do like sharing photos and videos of trout doing what they are supposed to do (instead of, exclusively, fish with hooks in their faces).

There's a redd there. If you can't see it you have no business wading over gravel from October till March. 

Onward and upward I reached the confluence of the two streams that formed the one I had been fishing. I went up the one on the left first. It was the smaller of the two and proved very difficult to fish. It gave up one brookie before I left it. Its brother on the right was easier but still difficult. The first fish to come out of the shadows there was probably one of the smallest browns I've ever caught.

I knew there were bigger fish than that here and continued plying what water I could get to in hopes of finding one. What I didn't expect was to encounter what really would be the fish of a lifetime in a stream of this size. I cast my fly to the head of a relatively shallow run and rolled it back down towards me. As I drew the rod up I saw a shockingly large fish following the fly down. There was a tell tale white flash of mouth, and I set the hook into the unyielding weight of an 18 inch wild brown trout. The fish didn't react quickly but sloshed around in the shallow water, continuing downstream past me. I turned the rod down, trying to keep pulling the fish down, but to no avail. The hook pulled, hitting me on the wrist and sticking there. I gasped both from the pain of being whacked by the splitshot and bead and loosing an unrealistically big brown.

I refused to let that be it and began working back downstream to get some of the water and fish that I hadn't fished to efficiently on the way up. I was rewarded with more than half a dozen fish, including a stud of a brookie and the brown I had missed where I started, but that big fish still irked me. I'll be back big fella. You'd best keep your wits about you. 

If you enjoy what I'm doing here, please share and comment. It is increasingly difficult to maintain this blog under dwindling readership. What best keeps me going so is knowing that I am engaging people and getting them interested in different aspects of fly fishing, the natural world, and art. Follow, like on Facebook, share wherever, comment wherever. Every little bit is appreciated! 
Thanks for joining the adventure, and tight lines. 

How to Catch a New Species...

...four months after you actually caught it. And some other stuff.

Back in the first week of July I was fishing the Battenkill above the blue ribbon trout water when I caught a number of odd little fish that looked like creek chubs, but also not quite like creek chubs. They were odd enough that I spent about an hour that I could have spent catching more fish trying to figure out what the damn things were. I failed to come to any conclusion other than their just being creek chubs.

Fast forward to this morning. I was pouring over electro-fishing data to build a list of places likely to produce the last handful of species in Connecticut that I have not yet caught. There are enough that it'll be a few years of really hard effort to get them all. But one of the fish on my list of targets was cutlips minnows, Exoglossum maxillingua. I realized while listing down places where they had been found in the state that I wasn't quite sure how to identify them. Upon a quick examination, I got a little bit excited. I realized I had just solved the mystery of that odd looking little fish in the Battenkill, and added a species to my list that I caught more than four months ago. Thank God I took a photo of one's mouth! This isn't the first occasion where I managed to do this kind of thing but it is the most satisfying. That little bastard kept me awake at night more than once, wondering if I was right about it being a creek chub or if it actually was something else, a new species perhaps. Now I know it is one, #95 on the lifelist, and one of the most interesting. Yes, cutlips minnow, a dull colored, small cyprinid, is one of the more interesting species I've ever caught for one very strange and morbid characteristic. When competition is high or food scarce, cutlips minnows will pluck the eyes out of their fellow school mates. Yup. You read that right. They eat each other's eyes. Their eye plucking isn't limited to their own species either, they'll eat whomever's eyes they can safely get to. It's a strange behavioral trait to carry, and hard to picture with such a tiny soft-mouthed fish. It is something I'd kinda like to see happen though, being the complete and utter fish nerd that I am.

So, welcome to the list Exoglossum maxillingua, sorry I almost missed you completely!

Now that I've finally put that one to bed, I can get to some other stuff I haven't. Basically, there's been a lot of really good days this fall that I haven't written about and don't even plan too, but they resulted in good fish or photographs that are worth sharing. Here are some of those things:

If you enjoy what I'm doing here, please share and comment. It is increasingly difficult to maintain this blog under dwindling readership. What best keeps me going so is knowing that I am engaging people and getting them interested in different aspects of fly fishing, the natural world, and art. Follow, like on Facebook, share wherever, comment wherever. Every little bit is appreciated! 
Thanks for joining the adventure, and tight lines. 

The Fish Don't Wait

The fish don't wait for it to get warm again, so why should we? Most anglers do, actually. That's probably not a bad thing for the fish, and it is one of the reasons I adore winter fishing. About 70 percent of the fisherman around here just give up once the nights are below freezing. Some of them will wait for the stillwaters to freeze over, and don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to ice fishing season too. But I'm not lazy enough or patient enough to wait for it and there are fish to be caught right now. Today it only squeaked above freezing for an hour's time. It was cloudy, the pressure was dropping, and the fish could feel the winter storm (dumping snow on us as I write this) approaching. I could too, but apparently I was the only one thinking about it that way because I was completely alone on the water. Not even a fresh track to be seen.

The idea was to both get my left hand used to being a part of the cast again and maybe hook a big rainbow. Nothing felt right about the first pool. It had been months since I'd done any spey casting at all and it was showing. Not that I was particularly good at it before either. But I was really inconsistent to start this outing. I had expected that though, and subsequently chose a run I didn't think would produce to work the kinks out in. 

I moved down to a pool I was much more confident in when I was comfortable with my casting and presentation. Just where I was expecting there to be a fish my purple marabou Intruder got slammed so hard the hit just about pulled rod out of my hand. I'm almost certain it couldn't have been a stocker rainbow. Not given the biggest fall ones I've seen here being about 20 inches. And I missed it. I cussed, then shook it off (literally). I made note of how much line I had out and the rod angle and made another 15 swings to that lie even though I knew whatever it was wasn't coming back. 

I moved up one pool and worked it through about as thoroughly as I could, which wasn't very. The river was high enough to make wading the line that would have been most optimal for good slow swings very uncomfortable. I got out to certain rocks and did what I could and was rewarded with a half a dozen grabs, including some spectacularly visual ones.

The fish don't wait around for it to warm up, and neither do I. It has been said a million different ways a million times by a million people: you don't become a better angler by waiting around for the weather that suits you best. There are still a lot of anglers out there that would being doing themselves good by heeding this advice. 

If you enjoy what I'm doing here, please share and comment. It is increasingly difficult to maintain this blog under dwindling readership. What best keeps me going so is knowing that I am engaging people and getting them interested in different aspects of fly fishing, the natural world, and art. Follow, like on Facebook, share wherever, comment wherever. Every little bit is appreciated! 
Thanks for joining the adventure, and tight lines. 

Home River During the Spawn

This is a less than easy time of year on my favorite stream. It's wild trout population has a tendency to migrate quite a bit up and down stream, especially during the spawn, and it can be tricky to find them up until the second week in December. But I like to go regardless, because the fish are rarely prettier than they are right now and I also like to find and make not of fresh redds so I can avoid them when they start to turn dark again (when fresh, the gravel is light colored and clean, but algae and vegetation will grow on the gravel before the alevins emerge). Beyond that, it's just fun to watch trout spawning. If I get really lucky and find a big communal redd cluster with anywhere from 5 to 15 trout on it, there's often a ton of fish immediately downstream that aren't spawning and are there to eat loose eggs. In the last couple days I made two visits. The fishing was as slow as I expected it to be, but very much worth while. On the first visit I caught one brown and lost a big fish, likely 14 or 15 inches. That was almost made up for by the number of wildly colored juvenile salmon I caught.

On day two I took four casts in the first pool I fish almost every time I come to my home river, a pool that had produced six salmon parr the day before and nothing else, and pinned an absolute stud of a brown and missed two similar fish. What a difference a day makes. 

One of the progeny of the late great Grandfather? He has the same coloration. Not that parr marks are still visible. I hope to encounter this fish if and when he reaches 18 inches. 

That had me hoping that this would be a bang up day, fish after fish after fish, and maybe a few big ones. Nope. I caught browns, but not double digits, and none as spectacular as the first fish. And I don't mind that it let me cover more water. I refuse to catch and release more than 12 wild trout in a day during the spawn. I want to limit my impact. If I'd caught that many in a quarter mile of water I wouldn't have seen as much of the river to look carefully for redds. I did find redds, which I will avoid for the next few months, but didn't see any trout actively working them. I suspect they were there but saw me coming. 

The last fish of the day was a big old holdover which was cool to catch. I leave anything that held over the summer alone. It's lucky for this fish we didn't cross paths in April, I may not have treated it well.

The stage is well set for early winter, one of my favorite times of year. On Christmas Eve Morning I will be on this river, as with every year for the last five years. And that day has a lot to live up to. 

If you enjoy what I'm doing here, please share and comment. It is increasingly difficult to maintain this blog under dwindling readership. What best keeps me going so is knowing that I am engaging people and getting them interested in different aspects of fly fishing, the natural world, and art. Follow, like on Facebook, share wherever, comment wherever. Every little bit is appreciated! 
Thanks for joining the adventure, and tight lines. 

The Search for Landlocked Sockeye

Sockeye are kind of the weirdo among their other salmonid brethren. It doesn't look out of place in the mix with other Pacific salmon. And it doesn't behave particularly differently either. Except from one glaring oddity. Oncorhynchus nerka eats zooplankton. Virtually every juvenile salmon and trout does, but none maintain their affinity for dining on tiny life forms quite like sockeye salmon do in their adult ocean going form. Like Atlantic salmon, sockeye can survive just fine as a landlocked population. This form of the species is called kokanee.

CT has some kokanee, in just three bodies of water. Two have good fisheries, one hopefully will in years to come but doesn't yet. Throughout most of their life cycle they are nearly impossible to catch on the fly. But when they spawn, they get snappy and may hit small streamers, San Juan Worms, and eggs. It's a short window, like all Pacific salmon sockeye are semelparous, spawning only once and dying immediately thereafter. So when I saw that kokanee were being caught last week in varying degrees of decay, I knew I wouldn't have long to attempt to add one to me life list this year. Noah and I made our plans. Hopefully we wouldn't miss them.

What we definitely didn't expect though, was snow.

The lakes that have kokanee in CT don't have any significant streams feeding them to get a spawning run of sorts, which is unfortunate because that would be really darn cool. Instead they attempt to spawn along lake shorelines that have a little bit of current and the right kind of gravel. So that's where we were going to focus out efforts. In our first spot we saw fish rise, probably trout, and I thought I saw a few red forms swimming around but couldn't be sure of it. We got cold hands and no hook ups, so we went to get some hand warmers. After a little while this spot lost it's shine and we wanted to try somewhere else. Unfortunately that somewhere else was somewhere I knew even less about.

Pheasant

That was definitely less productive in terms of finding anything that felt remotely like the right water for kokanee. I caught one perch before we gave up for more familiar fish, in hopes of just catching something remotely interesting. Another big lake, another unfamiliar kind of fishing. Trout and salmon in bigger lake is something I rarely ever do, so this was all largely experimental. We found some fish at creek mouths. Rainbows, not the big brown we were expecting and hoping for.

We decided to give our first spot one final go, one last chance at a kokanee. A few casts in I felt a pull and looked up to see a flash of deep red. Then it was gone.
So close yet so far. Till next year, kokanee.

If you enjoy what I'm doing here, please share and comment. It is increasingly difficult to maintain this blog under dwindling readership. What best keeps me going so is knowing that I am engaging people and getting them interested in different aspects of fly fishing, the natural world, and art. Follow, like on Facebook, share wherever, comment wherever. Every little bit is appreciated! 
Thanks for joining the adventure, and tight lines.