Travelling to the beat of a different drum.

 

Today was a replay of yesterday with mostly minor changes. The red line on the porch thermometer was just below the black 40 line at 6:15 this morning. The temp hung at 54 until after noon when it crept up to 58. There were clouds instead of the heavy smoke although the "air quality alert" will be in effect until midnight tonight.  Instead of taking a recon drive, I sat down at the bench and replaced a bunch of chewed up flies. 

The first boat arrived in the Lordville riff about 2:00. They sat without casting for almost an hour and then moved on. I wanted to fish somewhere below Buckingham so I decided to drive up to the boat launch and see how many boats were heading down to Long Eddy. Stopped on the Lordville bridge as a second boat was anchoring in the riff and then drove up to the launch site where four trailers were in line for a shuttle to Long Eddy. Now uncertain about my destination, I drove up rte. 191 towards Hancock. Stockport had too many trailers to begin to count and Shehawken had a combo of at least thirty vehicles and trailers. Walked down to the river and saw neither bugs nor risers. Continued my journey into Hancock where there were fishermen in sight both below and above the rte. 97 bridge. Stayed on 97 and drove back down to Lordville and went with my original plan.

Everybody who reads the reports, knows I love pseudos (in October), in June, not so much. Why? The shad. They have tiny little mouths and will seldom even try to eat big flies, but they will eat every pseudo that floats by. Well the big dark winged olives I saw yesterday were replaced today by pseudos and both the trout and shad were happy. For me it was a challenge to hook trout and not shad. Ended up hooking only four shad (all but one of which came unstuck). The trout occasionally got greedy and ate a big fly but it was slow going until the bigger olives showed up, late. When they did things turned around in a good way. Some of the rising trout never gave my big olives a look. Others, knew a good meal when it was put on their plate. Enough fish ate my offerings to make it another really good day.

If you are content throwing at risers who are being fished to by multiple boats and wade fishermen every day, and maybe catching a fish or three, you need neither my help nor advice. But if you want big, well rested fish, whose first run leaves you looking at the black spool between the remaining turns of backing, and who may have grown just a tad careless, go where no one else goes. Until the next hot spell shuts off the freestones, it's the better place to be.