Using A Thermometer to Catch More Fish

 Do you carry a thermometer when you're fishing? I do. I thought it was silly, back when I was younger and thought the excessive amount of gear fly anglers like to carry was just absurd. And, well, it is. There's plenty of superfluous or completely unnecessary gear being purchased- a thermometer, however, is not one of those things. A small thermometer is a key piece of equipment to help an angler catch more fish. Buy one. Seriously.

 More important than just carrying one and sticking it in the water is really properly using it. 

Not every part of the water is the same temperature, and to get a good understanding of what is going on an angler needs to think about where they're taking a temperature. The slack, shallow pool off the main current of a river will invariably be warmer than the riffle just 20 feet away, unless there's a spring seep there. The surface of a pond will be warmer in the spring and early summer than the bottom, but may in fact be notably colder after the first frost in the fall. To get a really thorough idea what's going on, I take a couple of different readings at different depths and in different locations. If there's a striking difference in temperature between one spot on a pond and another, it is certainly going to impact the behavior of the fish.  

Equally important is keeping record of the temperatures you take. Unless you have an extraordinary memory, write it down. Keep logs. Make not of the weather when you took the data, what the weather was in the prior days, and what time it was. And of course log how the fishing was. Water temperature and fishing quality are very much correlated, and if you've got a substantial back-log of reports and associated water temperatures, you'll be all the more prepared to repeat successes and rule out bad conditions as well. The unfortunate reality is that it will take time to get a solid, predictive pattern. I've been logging consistently for the better part of 4 years and still don't always hit the nail on the head. I've got a much better idea of how things work though. I know what temperature gets carp up on certain mud flats, and I know what temperature gets the walleye moving into the areas I target them early in the season. I also know what temperatures really kill the action in different places for different species. This means I can catch fish much more consistently, or at least waste less time fishing unproductive water and times. 

Monitoring water temperature has been key for catching trophy black crappie.

Aside from helping you catch more fish a thermometer can tell you when you should be fishing as well. After all, none of us want our released fish to keel over and die shortly after we've caught them, right? Carrying a thermometer when trout fishing in the summer is imperative. Be sure that you aren't fishing water that exceeds 67 degrees Fahrenheit. If you find a cold pocket, be mindful that trout use small spring seeps and the mouths of tributaries as thermal refuges, and that even though localized temperatures might be cold enough, the trout using these areas are under significant stress and should not be targeted. 

Thinking back, it's funny how reluctant I was to both start logging and start carrying a thermometer. It upped my game hugely, really taking things to another level. Of course, there's many things we all did as beginners that we can laugh at now. But if you aren't already, I certainly recommend getting a cheap little thermometer to carry with you on each and every fishing trip.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, C, Franky, Geof, Luke, Streamer Swinger, Noah, Justin, Sean, Tom, and Mark for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version.

The Herpetofaunal Awakening

 I can fish pretty much all winter. I don't always, because sometimes it legitimately hurts to be outside. When merely exposing your skin to air results in significant pain that's probably a bad sign. But generally, I like winter fishing. Aside from the popular holdover striper places, popular ice fishing spots, and the Farmington River I generally find myself along out there on the water in the winter, and I like that a lot. Am I patiently waiting for spring to bring much more aggressive fish and more variety? Absolutely. But my love of spring has to do with so much more than just fish. The return of the migrating birds and others passing through on their way north, the budding then blooming of native plants, the insects... I love it all. But the thing I really wait all winter for with baited breath, watching forecasts intently for any sign of hope, is the re-awakening of herpetofauna: reptiles and amphibians.

 It happens before the first day of spring on the calendar most years, at least recently. In fact, 2022 is the first year I've seen a frog in CT on the very first day of the year. But February has been a regular amphibian month for me, and March brings the first snakes. I made a quick stop while bouncing between brown trout streams a few weeks ago on a sunny 60 degree February day and saw the first Eastern ribbon snake of the year, though it slipped into its hole before I could get a photo off. A few rainy nights produced some beautiful wood frogs and the odd spring peeper as February transitioned into March. Visits to some den sites produced signs that some snakes had been out, but no sightings of the animals themselves. Then, on March 7th, I payed a visit to a black racer den. The den is in a steep road grad, composed of a mix of soil rock fill, most of which came from blasted out roadcuts not far away. The slope gets good exposure and has some nice emergent vegetation. Though racers are the predominant species, I've also found Eastern rat snakes and garters as well. 

I worked my way down the slope slowly, carefully examining the leaf litter for patterns I've trained my brain to recognize. Snakes aren't always out in the open and easily spotted. They frequently coil under puffed up fallen leaves or grass, letting the sun warm parts of their body while much remaining very cryptic. Even an adult black racer can be very hard to spot at times, and it's imperative that I spot the snake before I'm right next to it if I want to get the best possible photos. This time though it wasn't like that. The one snake that had emerged, a thick adult racer, was right out in the open adjacent to the area they emerge from. It was an impressive animal in perhaps it's least impressive state. His movements were slow and labored, as his body temperature was very likely still extremely cold. He was also completely covered in dust, a common trait of freshly emerged snakes. 

It was easy enough for me to see through the dust and grime to the spectacular animal underneath. I've got an affinity for racers. Perhaps it's the difficulty of photographing a big, pristine adult in it's best shape... they don't let you, most of the time. Racers are intense. They look at you, calculating, thinking, trying to judge your next move, and if they don't like it they can place an exceptionally accurate strike. They most painful snakebites I've ever taken have been from racers, and if you don't yield they'll bite over and over. Getting really close to a snake like that, ideally without handling it, is very challenging. It takes time, patience, and a keen awareness of the animal and it's body language. If I can photograph racers without getting tagged, I'm all the more prepared for the interactions with copperheads and timber rattlesnakes that I love so much. A racer beats the paints off either of CT's pit vipers when it comes to speed, erratic behavior, and cunning. They'll f*** you up, if you let um.

With the first photographed snake of 2022 under my belt, I was beginning to feel a lot better about life. I'm not sure anything makes me feel like seeing a good reptile or amphibian does. It's pure joy, a different joy than I get from catching a great fish. Similar, but just not quite the same. I've long felt that the good feeling I get from catching a fish is derived from the biological necessity to obtain nutrients. Though I deprive myself of the actual caloric intake by releasing so many of the fish I catch, I'm still taking advantage of the positive signals catching prey results in. It's not like that with finding a snake, it's something else. Something new, I think. See, every species gets positive reinforcement from obtaining food, but in most cases animals get negative reinforcement from encountering snakes. There was a time when getting bit by a venomous pretty much meant death for us. So we jump, we startle, and some of us remain perpetually terrified- but not everyone. Some people are just innately captivated by these weird creatures. I am certainly one of those folks, forever chasing the joy I get from seeing that patch of scales in the leaf litter.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, C, Franky, Geof, Luke, Streamer Swinger, Noah, Justin, Sean, and Mark for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version.

Big White Perch & The Lifer Magic Phenomena

 When Noah and I first started fishing together, one of the first fish we began researching and attempting to find were big migratory white perch. The lake we both grew up fishing had an introduced and stunted white perch population, so I think the whole appeal was in catching the much larger native version of a species we'd been catching for years. We'd heard that they fought pretty hard and could exceed 15 inches in length. Noah actually caught some one day, in summer of 2016, while striper fishing. As soon as we specifically targeted them though, we suddenly couldn't find them to save our lives. We were plagued by bad conditions and often just horrible luck. Sometimes were were even told there were plenty right where we were fishing, but we always failed to catch any. 

White perch follow an anadromous lifestyle in their native range along the CT coastline. Some fish in the larger tidal systems, like the Connecticut River may, never actually enter salt or brackish water at all, but along the coast are scattered populations that have a significant saltwater based component to their lifestyle. I should note that white perch are not really a perch, though they're described as a perch-like fish. They belong to the genus Morone and family moronidae, the temperate basses. They are far more closely related to white bass and striped bass than they are any perch. They do often fill a similar niche and even school with yellow perch when the two are present in the same habitat, and as far as body and fin structure they aren't completely dissimilar, so the naming can be forgiven in my opinion. 

Throughout much of the year, many white perch are messing around in tidal salt and brackish water, while some of their brethren are up in freshwater. They aren't a perfectly migratory anadromous fish like herring or shad, and unlike striped bass, most of which enter the ocean and perform some manor of significant migration, it seems a fair percentage of white perch are content to knock around in fully fresh water for most of their lives. Others only seem to wander into freshwater to spawn, and these guys and gals are the biggest of the big. These are the white perch that might well attain 16 inches and weight several pounds. These were the white perch Noah and I wanted to catch, and we couldn't seem to. 

This brings up a somewhat interesting phenomena we've noticed as life listers. Since we dedicate such a significant amount of time to targeting completely new species, we're routinely aware of this odd and frequent occurrence. It often takes an exceptionally long time to catch the first of a species, sometimes even unnecessarily. Then, once that first one has been caught, we find it either easy, or just easier to catch that species, whether we're actually targeting them or not. At first glance you might think we learned some key piece of information in the process of catching the first one that resulted in the rapid increase in success, but that isn't it. And though Noah and I had already caught probably thousands of white perch, our process of catching salty ones exemplifies this perfectly. We didn't approach it without prior knowledge. We knew spots, whether we were told them or dug them up through thorough research, or even just happened to be fishing them and saw someone else catching big white perch there. And it isn't like white perch are a remotely technical fish. Moreover, we had already caught the species, we just hadn't successfully targeted the populations with a saltwater component to their life history. 

Then Noah caught one this past fall. I was with him when that happened, maybe you read the post. Then the funny thing happened. He proceeded to start catching white perch consistently out of the very places we'd been trying for years to find them at. Lifer magic, and this wasn't even a real lifer. I hoped at that point that my time was next, that after years of trying I'd finally have my trophy native white perch. I began searching for them in Rhode Island, in places I knew were known to produce. No luck. Then, while back closer to home in an old haunt targeting holdover stripers with Noah and Garth, it finally happened. I proceeded to catch a few more after that. The seal is broken now, so this should suddenly become much much easier. 

Lifer magic is certainly not an isolated phenomena. Fisherman tend to be a little superstitious, sometimes very superstitious. Most of the time, I'm not. Save for this one case.

And maybe a few others.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, C, Franky, Geof, Luke, Streamer Swinger, Noah, Justin, Sean, and Mark for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version.

Following Trout and Char Through The Seasons

 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, 

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, C, Franky, Geof, Luke, Streamer Swinger, Noah, Justin, and Sean for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version.

Goodbye, Dear Friend

 On Saturday morning we lost someone very special. Alan Petrucci, "Brk Trt", passed away. Alan's blog, Small Stream Reflections, was a source of entertainment, joy, and peace for people around the world. He was a dear friend to many. I count myself very lucky to have known him. News of his passing hit me like a ton of bricks.

My heart goes out to his wife, children, grandchildren, and the rest of his family. I can't begin to imagine the loss they're feeling right now. 

Small Stream Reflections was the first thing that I gravitated to when I became interested in small stream wild trout fishing. Alan's photos drew me in, be they photos of the fish themselves or the magical places they were caught; places Alan called Brook Trout Forest.

 I started my own blog partially inspired by Alan's. It's fair to say this blog wouldn't exist in its original form were it not for Small Stream Reflections. 

Naturally, I wanted to fish with Alan. I reached out to him by email and we eventually made plans to fish together. We met one morning at a small stream near my home. He then took me to a couple streams of his own, streams that quickly became important parts of my life. I'll never forget Alan's words: "I'm going to take you to **** brook. This place has the most beautiful brook trout in the state of Connecticut."

We were fast friends. We both loved brook trout for the same reasons, and Alan's quiet and patient nature took me in as it has many others. We fished together quite a bit over the years, sometimes planned and sometimes incidentally. Many times I'd be focused on a piece of water when I'd hear a familiar voice. I'd always look up with a huge smile on. "I thought I'd run into you today", he'd say.

 We shared new streams with each other a lot. Alan's excitement with finding a new wild trout stream was infectious. One of the last days he and I fished together we were trying to find sea run brook trout in Connecticut. Alan had a deep love for salters as anyone who read his blog knows. His words and photos of Red Brook have undoubtedly contributed to it's protection into the future.

Alan drew like-minded people into his orbit, and whether in person or online he gave them something wonderful. He shared knowledge readily. His skills and instinct as a fly tier were obvious. If you've ever seen one of his feather-wing streamers you know what I mean. Both through his blog and personal conversations he made many people better fly tiers. He was just as generous with his own flies. Our mutual friend, John Huber, sent me this yesterday. 

Alan was an incredible angler as well, far better than he'd let on. If you watched him fish a run you quickly understood. His trademark was effortlessness. There were no unnecessary steps made, he didn't put in excess effort. His memory for where he'd caught specific fish was remarkable, and made me think much more about what that can do for one's ability to catch trout. He'd point to a non-descript bit of shallow riffle, a place I'd walk right by normally, and tell me about the brown trout he caught there on a soft hackle. I owe my thoroughness on the stream to Alan. He made me slow down and observe. 

Alan introduced me to some of my favorite people as well. John, Kirk, Mark, and Pete... the New Year's day crew. I was so excited when Alan first invited me. It was such a wonderful tradition only interrupted by the pandemic. I don't get to fish with those guys enough. We lost Pete to cancer, far too soon. John and I observed the New Year's tradition last year and a few days late this year. I found myself on the same jetties as Kirk a lot during tunny season. Mark moved to Massachusetts. Hopefully we'll all get to see each other sometime in the near future. 

Alan was such a special person. I'm reminded, time and tine again, just how important it is not to take the people in your life for granted. I hope Alan knew how much he meant to all of us.

 We'll miss you so much, dear friend. Your memory will live on in every small tumbling stream and every bejeweled wild fish.