There's a reason no one will fish with me.

 

It had been over ten years since I last floated down the Delaware in a drift boat. Mark Stauffer, who has endured my presence in a bonefish skiff for many years, was passing through on his way to visit his parents and wanted to give the Delaware a try. With the  recent high water, floating was the only option. Matt Carlin, who guides out of the Troutfitter in April and May, (from June until October he is dodging bears and guiding fishermen at a posh fly in camp in Alaska), did some schedule juggling and freed up Tuesday for our float.

Got a tardy start when Mark got stuck in a traffic jam on I-81 for an hour and forty-five minutes. Matt had the 3 man pontoon boat in the water at "Barking Dog" when we arrived and we both had landed 17 inch browns within the first ten minutes of the trip. There were caddis and Hendricksons on the water in sufficient numbers to get fish up and we had targets all day.

The fishing - First of all, most sane people take turns casting out of a drift boat. Two people can cast at the same time, if the guide lets them, they know what they are doing, and the conditions are favorable. The pontoon boat in smaller than a standard drift boat, the wind blew at ten to fifteen most of the day and the guy in the back of the boat  took a while to remember what he was supposed to be doing. Mark was up front with his back to me. It was my job to only cast when his fly was on the water. I didn't always remember. Stuck an apple caddis in my index finger when my line wrapped around an oar. Left a fly in Marks shirt, one in my shirt and one in my left ear lobe (yes, it was in right over the barb). Used the same technique for hook removal that I used to get the iso out of the inside of my nose a year or so ago. Matt was assigned the job of giving the line a yank while I held the eye of the hook down. Saw him take a deep breath but when he yanked, out came the hook with not a bit of pain. Once we settled down into a routine things went much better and we hooked fish (quite a few actually) rather than fishermen. The one surprising thing to me and to Matt was that most of the fish were between 12 and 15 inches. It seemed that the big fish were just not feeding on top. 

Because of the late start and the numbers of fish we had to throw at. We opted to cut the float short and take out at Hale Eddy (one of the advantages of a pontoon boat). Matt called his shuttle guy on the phone and presto the car was rerouted to our destination. The only disappointment in the entire day of fishing was the spinner fall. In short, there wasn't any. The bugs are moving upstream and apparently the hatch hasn't gone on long enough for a spinner fall where we were. Hopefully the Armada down at the mud flats had more bugs in the last hour of daylight than we did.

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