Humor police dock A-119 two days of fishing.

 With a social obligation this evening (Thursday) I closed up the fishing camp this morning. Will probably forego a return trip until Sunday although it sure feels good standing in waist deep release water all afternoon.

The fishing - There is no question now that the trend to smaller trout is real. The fish also get harder to fool on sulfurs every day. I fished for several hours on both Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons with very few quality browns to show for my labors.  The rainbows continue to eat the sulfurs but the big browns have done less surface feeding during the day. Evening have found the browns back in action and I have been able to get some good ones to eat my flies. Will try to post a comparison showing the % of both browns and rainbows caught that are over 17 inches by month for May, June and July the last three years.  Don't need to tell you that you earn every fish right now. On the positive side you have no shortage of targets and every once in a while one eats the wrong fly.

With the temperature gage at Lordville out of service for 48 hours during the worst heat wave of the season, it's hard to tell exactly how hot the water temp got. With the graph back in working order today it's easy to see that the target high of 75 was exceeded, with highs of at least 77 degrees each of the last three days. Who ever does the releases has done a great job since the inception of the program but this has to rate as an epic failure. One major concern of mine is the additional water released from Downsville. If it was a decision made to avoid a fish kill in the UEB, it's justified, but it only exacerbated the BR problem by adding additional super heated water (80 degrees) into the BR at junction pool. Would love to hear a comment from "someone in the know" explaining the Pepacton release rational.

Note to Jack M. - The monitor of A-119's somewhat weird and oftentimes misunderstood sense of humor (Jean) called early Wednesday morning to inform me that there was a chance (she didn't use "slight" as an adjective) that Mr. M. would interpret the first sentence in the paragraph responding to his comments as disrespectful of his fishing prowess. Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Hooking a fish of that size on the Delaware twice in three days is a very noteworthy accomplishment. The "Chamber of Commerce fish" expression, which I often use when someone catches a bigger fish than I do, originated up north on the Ausable River many years ago where each year, in an effort to promote tourism, several hundred breeder trout were obtained from hatcheries and dumped into the "No Kill" section of the river. They weren't quite as hard to catch as the fish we try to fool on the Delaware.  As stated in the rest of the paragraph, your observations were some of the  best anyone has submitted. Hope to hear more from you.

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