It Was Fun, Fun, Fun 'Til Debby Took The Isos Away.

 

 Left the fishing camp at 2:30 and headed east, determined to right the ship. The WB release has been raised to six hundred, the silt is coloring the water, no one is reporting any bugs or rising fish and I wanted to give the EB, UEB, and BK a good look. 

Started out driving up the UEB. With a release of 600cfs, it's fishable for waders, with care. The water was colored by the silt deposited during hurricane Debby's onslaught. The increased flow is a good thing for many reasons. First, it will flush out a lot of the silt. Second, it will raise the level of the EB and at the same time cool it off. Third, it will also hopefully encourage fish return to their home pools. Saw no fishermen, bug or rising fish. Did not fish.

Drove over to the BK on old rte.17 and either fished or walked the banks of four of the best iso spots I know. It is almost a certainty that Debby had a profound negative effect on the insect life in the system.  The number of iso husks on the streamside rocks is but a small fraction, (less than 10%), of what I usually see. Fished a pool where I saw a few rising fish, and a set of fresh boot tracks. Went downstream below where boot racks appeared to enter the stream and caught a 10 inch rainbow and a 9 inch brown that both engulfed my iso. Saw rising fish upstream from the boot tracks. One fish quietly came up for a look and refused, two fish gave me indignant refusals and two just ignored the fly. If you want the fish to eat your iso, you either need your's to be the first iso they've seen in a long while or tie better flies than I do.

At 6:00 I left the BK and headed for the BR. On my last visit there I saw a few isos and white flies, and caught 3 rainbows. Got there at 6:30 and saw nothing. Threw an iso for half an hour without seeing a fish. With the sun off the water I saw a few fish make splashy, chasing something up, rises from which I never got a look. Finally saw a fish make a surface rise, he took on the first cast, thrashed around on the surface and was gone. The next fish sipped what turned out to be pseudo spinners not 20 feet from me. He was moving back and forth and it took several casts before he ate. While fighting the fish I saw two fish sipping in slower water off to the side. Ended up hooking all three. They were all rainbows and as fat as any I've ever seen in the river.

The Fishing -on a scale of one to ten, I'd rate it a .5. (Be sure you see the point before the five). It is dismal. If, like me, you are currently unemployed and can fish whenever you want, stay home and wait for a cloudy rainy day. There were three trailers at Buckingham at 2:30, they were all gone when I drove by at 6:30. I know of nothing worth putting your waders and vest on for before 7:15, (and it's dark before 8:00).

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