Central PA Wild Rainbows and Joe's 90th (Pt. 1)

Mike and I made our way to State College last Thursday for our third trip there together, just 48 hours in front of a winter storm that the media was hyping up as much as they possibly could have.  Though CT was snow-less when we left,  Central PA already had a dusting and while we fished the evening of our arrival more was falling. It was cold and getting dark fast, but we were going to get in as much time on the water was we could, so we set out looking to find some trout.

It was difficult to say the least. The trout we were fishing over get pressured non-stop. They are smart and they are quick. I missed a lot of fish because they seemed to be taking exclusively the moment my fly reached the bottom 3 inches of the water column. I usually didn't see any leader movement, just a flash. Eventually I smartened up and just started to set blind as soon as the fly got into the zone. It worked, I got one small brown and lost a bigger one that was only on for a moment. Not long thereafter, it was too dark to see my sighter.

The next morning, after an appropriately slow start, we were on the water again in slightly warmer conditions. The sun never came out and there were some flurries... to me, this was ideal winter trout weather. We chose to fish an area I thought might produce some bigger fish. I marched off upstream, Mike went down. I started with a Sexy Walt's and a San Juan. When I lost that I kept the Walt's on the point and put a Hump's Cress Bug on the dropper tag. And when I lost that I kept that Walt's on the point and put a very simple pattern that is just black ice dub, olive colored wire ribbing, and a florescent orange tag with a tungsten beadhead. My leader was 9'6" long, my sighter was two lengths of yellow Suffix Hi Vis mono tied onto the leader in nail not fashion. I can adjust where on the leader they are just by sliding them. This gives me more versatility: I can slide them down the leader for fishing very shallow water, up for moderately deep water, and then use the fly line as a sighter when nymphing the deepest water. Now, I don't talk about sighters much and that's because I don't use them much. Why was I using one here? In low light winter conditions it can be much more difficult to keep track of your leader. So even if you aren't full on Euro nymphing, it is pretty smart to use some kind of versatile sighter in the winter. 

 That's basically what I stuck with for a nymph rig for the duration of the trip. If it ain't broke don't fix it. 

The first fish I caught was a cute little wild rainbow. That was a surprise! This was my first rainbow out of Spring Creek. I was even more surprised when two casts later I hooked and lost another. Then, in the next bit of good water, I caught two more and lost a third, all rainbows. 

For the next hour I caught a fair number of fish, missed some, and lost others... not one of them a confirmed brown! Some of the rainbows were clearly hatchery fish, like this one: 

Others, not so much. In fact, most of the bows I was catching were fin-perfect, par marked, and brightly colored. Which isn't unexpected. Spring Creek is unstocked. Some rainbows escape from the hatcheries, others may come up from Bald Eagle Creek, but the bulk of the stream's bows are wild fish. They aren't as abundant as the browns, but for some reason they were just fired up and I was on the right pattern. 

After loosing one quite decent fish, probably 16 inches and hard as nails, I headed back downstream to see how Mike had done. We split water for a little while in a good stretch of pocket water. I found a redd there, and focused my efforts on the nearby holds hoping the builders had been good sized browns and that they were somewhere close by still. 

The Redd

 The redd makers seemed to have skidaddled, which is no surprise. I've seen no correlation to where a big trout holds up and where they redd, to the degree that whole stretches of rivers in my area that are loaded other times of year are just devoid of trout during the spawn. But if it were just a week or two after the fish had gotten off the redd I would not be that surprised to find one in the closest good lie, bulking up. As long as you can avoid stepping into, wading below, or kicking silt into the redd, it is worth fishing close to it.

Clearly this fat piggy young wild bow was not one of the redd builders. But I think it has probably taken advantage of brown trout eggs ending up in the drift.

I did manage to get a few browns there just before we left Spring Creek. It is fascinating how things change work. Mike, Paolo and I fished this same area in August and it was just stacked with browns, the only rainbow I saw was a huge hatchery escapee fish caught by a bait fisherman. And even this time Mike got more browns than bows. Why? There are so many variables to take into consideration. It's things like this that keep me fascinated with fishing.

We decided to go explore a new stream, one with big fish potential. On my way back up towards the parking area I was periodically stopping and flicking casts into good looking water. I picked a few little fish up, then set into something substantial. After the set it just felt like I was lifting a clump of debris off the bottom. But then I saw something big, yellow, and orange coming towards the surface. I had just enough time to register that this was a gorgeous brown of substantial size when the fly popped out. I gasped and uttered a painful "no", staring into the bit of water into which the fish had disappeared. Yeah, that one stung. 

The new stream was picture perfect streamer water. And as much as I love streamer fishing though, I can be pretty lazy about changing tactics especially in the winter. So I fished the nymphs until I lost the entire rig. I got slammed just shortly after getting to the best looking pool in the stretch. Then I caught... a friggen wild rainbow. Apparently they weren't letting me get away so easily!

About 20 feet upstream in the inside seem I hit a brown. He was a pretty good looking fish, very chrome and fin perfect. 

Eventually I lost my whole tippet length to the sharp slate bottom and switched over to a streamer friendly leader system. I started with a brown and tan Complex Twist Bugger. Three casts in it got hit on the pause and the hook was set automatically on the next rod twitch. It was a chunky holdover rainbow. With action that quick I was pretty sure it was on.

150 some casts later with absolutely no takes and I was less convinced. So I lengthened my leader, tied on a much heavier sculpin pattern, and put one split shot ahead of it. A solid whack on a dead drift told me I had made a good choice, and eventually I hooked up to the best brown on the day. It wasn't big, but it fought hard and it was very colored up... I'll take it. Usually I'm about quality over quantity but some days I'll gladly take a steady pick of small-average fish. And I did need the practice, especially the nymphing. Next time I trout fish in CT though you can bet I'll be slinging meat.

Florida: Strange New Species

As Noah and I drove across peninsular Florida once again, I felt partly fulfilled and partly frustrated. In our time on the Gulf Coast, I had not gotten a single new species. I failed to get my redfish. But I had caught a lot of snook, a few good snook, and one quite big one. The end was in sight now. We had caught a lot of new species in Florida this time. I had already reached my goal of adding at least 15 to my life list. It was time to buckle down and really get a lot done in the time we had left. 

As we traveled, we passed lots of oranges. Some growing, some in transit. The growers seem not to mind loosing some product: The trucks are filled as much as they can be, providing an explanation for the piles of roadside oranges we saw in Arcadia. Noah and I joked that if we tailgated the a truck long enough with a catcher's mitt on one hand out the window, we could probably get a free snack.

We spent a night at my Grandparent's again before going back to our base camp. It gave us a good chance to just relax a little. We needed it badly. But in the morning, we were ready to go. On our way south towards Jupiter we decided to hit some familiar places and some new places, starting in Melbourne.

Our first spot was quite productive. I had found some funky species here in November and wanted to get some of them, and this time I did. We both got ourselves frillfin gobies, which were easy to find and fool but not as easy to bring to hand. Dropping my tiny flies into different cracks and holes produced many takes and I eventually did bring some to hand, but I found that, much like darters, the little turds liked to attack my split shot instead of the fly. That is an annoying trait of some of the more aggressive micros I target. These little gobies did have a big attitude. It makes them pretty adorable.

frillfin goby, Bathygobius soporator

Mangrove snapper were pretty abundant there this time, though they were genuinely difficult to get on artificials and bait. I got a fair number of takes and just two to hand. Also abundant were scaled sardines (pilchards) and some other kind of tiny baitfish, which were periodically getting trashed by either jacks or spanish mackerel. We didn't catch any of the blitzing fish, so we'll probably never know which.

mangrove snapper, Lutjanus griseus

Eventually Noah wandered elsewhere while I continued trying to get new species in the rocks. He found some hardhead catfish and was sight fishing them. He called me up and I made my way over. Sure enough there were some cats meandering around a weedy area. He had already caught more than one. I took a few shots before I hooked one. These were a pretty unique fish. Just seeing a catfish swimming around in salt water was weird enough, but these things jumped sometimes when hooked and had a funky metallic sheen to them. Though widely considered a trash fish throughout their range and being very difficult to handle, I found them pretty interesting. 

hardhead catfish, Ariopsis felis

As tricky and somewhat dangerous as hardhead catfish are to handle, not long after I managed to get something to eat my fly that was much, much more dangerous. I had seen a lot of stingrays already on this trip. I'd made casts to a couple. Spooked all of them. This time? That thing just swam over and planted right on top of the fly, taking it much the same way as the skates I've sight fished have. I set the hook, battled the fish for a little while, and found myself in a predicament. I was not going to get a good grip and grin with this thing... I let it sit in the shallows for a moment and called Noah to see if he could grab a towel. Eventually I got antsy and just snapped what mediocre photos I could get, broke the fish off, and ushered it out of the tide pool. This was my third cartilaginous fish species on the fly. 

common stingray, Dasyatis pastinaca

So, I had added 3 new species to my list at this spot today. Could I get one of the scaled sardines we were seeing? We certainly had small enough tackle. Noah and I both sat on a concrete culvert trying to hook a pilchard for a long time. He had the added advantage of being able to use bait. Though I could use bait, it would disqualify the catch from being added to my list. But what we found was that these fish wouldn't grab onto anything for long, bait or artificial. That is usually what makes getting a smaller fish hard on the fly: they just don't hold on long enough to set the hook. Well, in this case they were behaving the same way with the shrimp and the fly. We would occasionally have one on for a few seconds before it would flip off the hook and back into the water. Eventually, Noah got one. I found that when he quit regretting them the going got tougher for me: having bits of shrimp in the water was getting the fish into a frenzy. So I started just tossing pieces in and jigging my fly violently right under the surface. Noah was pretty much packed and ready to leave when I finally managed to hook one of those little buggers and get it to hand. This is a species I certainly hadn't expected to get on this trip, or ever honestly. 

scaled sardine, Harengula jaguana

From there we continued south, and found another very charismatic new fish species. But that will have to wait for another day.

Florida: A Really Big New Year's Day Snook

When the clock struck 12:00 and signaled that the 1st day of 2019 had started, the state of Florida detonated. Noah and I were awoken from our less than completely restful living-in-a-tent-for-a-week sleep to the sound of hundreds of explosions and celebratory gunfire, which we had to put up with for a little while before being able to doze off again.

The morning dawned foggy and cool. More than 1,400 miles away back at home, it wasn't even getting light out yet, and in a few hours my small stream friends Mark, Alan, and Kirk would be meeting on a wild trout stream to spend a relatively warm winter's day observing the traditional New Year's Day outing. I stood outside barefoot in shorts and a suede button down shirt. It was already more than 20 degrees warmer than it would get in CT that day, though the fog made it feel cool. I hoped that I would get my redfish today. 

As you already know, that didn't happen.

Noah and I found ourselves launching just a couple miles from where we had started our morning. The fog which had already all but burned off on the redfish flats was still hanging on over the river. Just outside the launch, we were treated to quite a sight. A lone roseate spoonbill stood at the upper end of a sand bar. That moment, right there, is where 2019 actually started for me. 

Shortly thereafter, a paddle repair I made mid summer gave way and I was left with a one ended paddle. I could make do with a one ended paddle. The going would be a little slower, but I stand up in the yak whenever I can so I use the paddle like one for an SUP a lot. For that, the one-endedness would not by an issue. For sitting and truckin' it to and from spots in current or wind, well, that was going to be a pain. But I am stubborn, persistent, and gritty, and I was going to fish and fish hard. 

We entered the mouth of a creek we had found a lot of snook in the afternoon before, and though we had found no fish at all in the first few hundred feet of bank I started working it. These fish move with the tide and the temperatures and the light. The conditions were different. There was good structure there. I was going to give it a fair shake. I had tied on a fly that I refer to simply as a Devlin Blend Deceiver. It's tied pretty much the same as a buck-tail deceiver but with Ian Devlin's yak hair blend in place of bucktail. It is slimmer, flashier, and if given a good wide epoxy head and tied on a stout hook, it swims with a great cadence when worked with fast, abrupt strips.  And that's how I was fishing it here, laying it up into and under the laydowns and brush and stripping like mad. On about the fifth cast I put the fly right under an overhanging tree that had a few branches running into the water. As had been the mantra I let the fly sink for 5 seconds, then made 3 strips with long pauses before increasing speed. Right after I sped up I saw a flash. I didn't think it was a particularly large fish. It missed the fly. It came back on the next pause and inhaled the fly. Seeing the size of the lateral line and the distance between the dorsal fish and the start of the tail made me forget to breath. I hammed the hook home into dead weight. The fish acknowledged it with a couple disdainful head shakes and sulked down on the bottom where I couldn't see her, as if deciding what the best course of action was. Before making the initial, authoritative "you can't stop me now" run I had come to expect from every snook I caught, this one jumped. She couldn't even get her whole body out of the water. The sound she made, not just landing back into the water but by thrashing her head back and forth, is something I will remember forever. Picturing it now in my mind I feel the same feeling I did in the moment: a massive knot in my stomach as I could actually hear my fly getting knocked around. I had bowed to the fish like I was supposed to and the hook held. She righted her self and took off. Not in the way the smaller fish I had caught had, but much slower and much more confident. It made the pit in my stomach grow more still. It was as though this fish knew she could beat me. At fifty feet she stopped again and showed signs that she might make another jump. I buried the top half of my rod underwater trying to keep her down but I couldn't. Again she came up and breached, practically in slow motion. Then, once more, she righted herself and ran another 50 feet towards and big snag. I put the iron to her, scared that this would be where the battle would be won or lost. She stopped short of the logs though and sulked deep again. Noah had quit fishing at this point and caught up with me to assist if I needed it. I had the fish close now but I was very much under her power, unable to do anything but try to pull her up to the surface. She remained close and just slowly and steadily pulled me further up the creek. Eventually she was whipped and rolled on the surface, her massive broom tail still swinging to and fro. I tried desperately, shaking like a leaf, to get my hand in her mouth. By that time, she had towed me more 375 feet up the creek from where I had hooked her. 

An epic battle of strength and wit.

When I finally did and really truly felt her weight I was awestruck. This was a massive, spectacular, gorgeous creature. I'm laughing quietly and almost tearing up right now thinking about this fish. To catch an animal like that in such an environment, and on the fly no less...

I feel so, so privileged for having been given that opportunity. 

As I let go of her caudal peduncle and let her swim back into that dark winter water, I was briefly speechless. Then I hollered to all that could hear. Not words. Just pure ecstasy. 

That was my first fish of 2019.

I caught a bunch more that day. 

But I don't think anybody needs to see those. 

This was our last day on the west side before heading back to our base camp near Jupiter. Where our last trip to this river had left both Noah and I wanting more, I was completely satisfied. And Noah will be living very close by soon.

Even though I feel fulfilled, I can't wait to go back myself. That is a very special place. It will hold a special place in my heart forever. 

This post is dedicated in memory of my great grandmother, Helen McGuire,

and my friend, Lester Groat.

Florida: One Eyed Willy, the Snook Slayer

As I sit here in a hotel room just outside of State College, PA, with a soft snow falling outside, and some Scottish guy talking about being struck by lightning on the television, thinking about how good the fishing could be tomorrow, it is hard to think of exactly what to write about Noah and my second to last day of snook fishing the Charlotte Harbor area. Honestly, I wasn't going to make this a very long or in depth post anyway because no matter what I do the next one is going to overshadow it.

So, I may as well just make this one funny.

Meet One Eyed Willy, the Snook Slayer. Willy was born to be a big water trout catcher. But he would meet his end in south Florida after a very successful career in fooling common snook.

Exactly what happened to One Eyed Willy's second eye is up to some speculation. Did he loose it from bouncing of a submerged log? Or when a big snooked slammed him? Or was it the doing of the hard jaws of a gar? We will never know.

But I can say without doubt that One Eyed Willy could fool snook with the best of them.

Centropomus undecimalis

When tossed under structure like this...

... One Eyed Willy was sure to draw out a hungry line sider.

So. What was the fate of One Eyed Willy? 

I'm actually not kidding, I don't know what I did with that damned fly. It was the only gamechanger that size I was carrying. I really don't know where I put it. I didn't loose it in a snag, I didn't break off any fish. It just disappeared. 

Where are you, One Eyed Willy? 

Florida: Redfish

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Thanks for joining the adventure, and tight lines.

Redfish is very near the top of the list of species I want to catch most. They are a fish built very much to fit my style. They are handsome fish with variation in coloration. They feed in shallow water very frequently, where they can be sight fished. They are aggressive predators, taking a variety of streamers and topwater flies. They tend to live in beautiful places. 

And they are not easy to catch. 

That last one has become pretty clear to me. I got a handful of shots at redfish in 2017. I did not catch one. On Noah and my second trip, it was a top priority for me. I really, really wanted to get a redfish. Probably more than I want to get a tarpon. 

We had narrowed our focus to an area on the east side of the Gasparilla Sound. Sea grass was the key. We had to find areas where it was abundant. The area we were in was a good place to look, whereas many other flats in Florida have had huge reductions in the amount of bottom vegetation. Where the sea grass isn't, life is sparse. Where the sea grass is, life is abundant and concentrated. The loss of sea grass and the other life that relies on it can be traced directly to human activity.

Getting to our launch place just after dawn, I was confident we were in the right place. A huge school of mullet came into view as a patch of nervous water 50 yards long and 15 yards wide. They moved by in a long train as we geared up, jumping and splashing and rippling the surface, moving north. 

We went the direction they came from. We found grass. We found mullet. We found some stingrays. Then we found what we looking for. In the low light of the new day, a tail brushed the placid surface, signifying the presence of a feeding redfish. It was a beautiful spite.
And that's right where things went downhill.
In retrospect, this morning was the best chance I had at getting my first red. We saw the most tailing reds, we saw the most redfish in general, and there were the most good shot opportunities. And the half hour after we saw the first tail was the best window all day.

I blew it. I blew it hard. I made poor shots, I made bad drifts, I wasn't patient enough. I got interest from maybe 3 reds in that window. From then on, finding tailing fish was very, very difficult, and we found that targeting the cruising fish in that crystal clear was very tricky indeed. When you can see the fish coming from 90 feet away and you have a pretty good cast, you'd think it wouldn't be hard to convince one to eat. The fish that didn't spook from seeing the line in the air spooked from it and the fly hitting the water, and if they didn't spook from that they gave the fly and leader an extremely wide berth, so wide I knew they weren't even seeing it clearly. Then they'd probably spook from seeing me or the kayak.

What made this all the more frustrating was that some of these reds were just enormous, big enough to blow my expectations. There were plenty of 20 to 30 inch reds around, but I saw a few that were over 40 without a shadow of a doubt. So massive were these fish that I was shaking severely upon seeing them cruising down the white sand strips, though not enough to stop me from making what I thought were good casts. When the fish showed their disapproval and ran away, leaving huge boils and clouds of sand behind, I had to sit down to catch my breath.

There were snook around too, and they were even more snobbish. They were all laid up relatively close to. but not under, the mangroves, and generally near a creek mouth or around a point. These fish were impossible, at least with artificials and probably with live bait too. They were extraordinarily skittish and could see and feel you coming from a long, long, long way out. After a point I just stopped trying for them. There were plenty of more willing fish in the river. I might as well just admire these ones from afar and not bother them.

But my inability to get a redfish was bothering me. Hugely. After that first day we came back every morning. I never got another decent shot. I didn't catch anything there. Not even a sailfin or hardhead catfish, or one of the few big jacks or pompano we'd occasionally see close to the reds.

My inability to get a redfish stands out to me as the most frustrating part of my angling career thus far. Those fish haunt my dreams like no other. Believe me when I say that this post has been a painful one to write. I want to forget every one of the blunders I made targeting these fish, and every time I thought I had nailed it and the fish dissented. And because it will be a long while before I am in red drum territory again, those memories are going torture me for a while.
 It didn't ruin my experience completely, the flat we fished there was one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. But I can't get those damned fish out of my mind.

I think, sometimes, you can want to catch a certain fish too much.