Hopefully I'm Entitled To A Rant Once In A While.

 

It's 8:55, wet clothes are draped over the kitchen chairs, the fishing vest is hanging up over the wood burning stove, and I'm in dry clothes sipping on my Perfect Manhattan. No, I didn't fall in again. I was concentrating on getting some subsurface feeders to eat my duns when over the hill behind me came a wind row of rapidly moving clouds followed by the roar of both the wind and the rain. I didn't have a chance. If I'd a fallen in, the top half of me couldn't have been any wetter. The car wasn't a hundred yards away and I was soaked to the skin long before I got there.

Left Lafayette this morning forgetting only the bag of chips Jean had bought for me and that little card you have to put in a trail cam to get pictures, (planned on getting a look at the Lordville fox). Had my empty water jugs in the back of the car so that I could drive out NY97 from Hancock to Lordville Road and down to the spring, (eight  miles), fill the jugs, and then drive back to Hancock, (eight miles), and down PA191 to Equinunk, (eleven miles), and over the bridge to Lordville, (one mile). If I was younger and stronger I could have walked a half mile up Lordville road, filled the six gallon jugs and carried them back down the hill to the Lordville Estate. Will be glad when the new bridge is done.  

The fishing - Arrived in Deposit at 12:30, the sulfurs were hatching, the fish were feeding and no one was there. From the route 17 bridge all the way down to Danagher's I counted no boats and but three wade fishermen. On the drive down this morning I decided to try to give you a picture of what I do on an average day of fishing in hopes of getting you to pay better attention to the how's and whys. The only thing I wrote down was the size and number of fish caught, with an 81 year old brain and no teleprompter, the other stats are "to the best of my memory".

I landed two yearlings which do not otherwise appear in any of the stats. In the 3.5 hours of fishing, I used sulfur duns the entire time except for about ten minutes when I tried three emergers in a riff where I could see the trout eating subsurface, never got a sniff on the emergers. I had at least thirty-five fish come to the fly. I hooked seventeen fish and felt three or four more that didn't hook up. Lost five fish, all good ones, one broke me off, one I broke off, for sure one was fouled hooked, and I think two or three others may have been. I landed 12 fish including three 18 inchers. I fished from 12:45 until 3:45 and from 7:15 until the storm hit at 7:45.  Almost every cast was at a rising fish. Many casts were ignored. The storm ended things just as they were starting up in the evening.

Today's fishing was what has been the norm for me for the past two and a  half months. The river is full of fish and they can be caught, but to do so, you need to give the fish credit for what they have learned, and stop doing things the way you did them twenty years ago. Fishing fly patterns that no longer work, and obsessing over eighty-five foot casts make no sense in todays world of catch and release fishing. You need to upgrade your approach, I've outlined what you need to do to catch fish on dries numerous times. Last Friday I spent the three hours between the mid-day hatch and the evening hatch driving around watching fishermen not catch a single fish. I was going to make examples of them by talking about why they weren't catching fish but have decided instead, to encourage everyone to either go back and read old blog pages, or go to the Troutfitter and buy a bunch of bobbers, (Dave just got a new shipment in) and fish nymphs.