Angler 119's Delaware River Fishing Report

  Home for a social obligation (grandson's law school graduation party) so no fishing today.  The last four days were my best stretch of fishing so far this year. It has proved difficult to be in the right place to fish good hatches but I have had the good fortune of finding little spurts of feeding where the fish have been happy to eat flies with hooks in them. Last night I drove over to the BK out of desperation when the 3:00 pm Hendrickson hatch on the upper reaches of the WB lasted all of fifteen minutes. Found some rainbows quietly sipping something in a shallow riff. Made repeated short casts over them with caddis spinners which they ate without hesitation when they finally looked up and saw them, (it was clearly not what they were feeding on). When the feeding died down I moved upstream hoping to find a caddis spinner fall. Found fish eating Hendrickson spinners instead. The day before I had about an hour in what was a modest paralep/Hendrickson hatch where the fish ate...

 The month of April is in the rear view mirror. Despite my complaints about not finding good hatches it was my third best April ever, in numbers of fish caught. The percentage of fish over 17 inches (36%) was down slightly from last year but the number of fish in the nineteen inch column (the 2018 year class) showed that many of them are still around. The most encouraging part of my catch statistics were the numbers of two and three year olds which appeared system wide.  There were only three questions all month, I assume from this that you have all the answers, and just maybe I should be the one doing the asking. Dennis wanted to know about articulated dry flies. I'm clearly not the one to ask as I thought they were a streamer type thing. Jack McD  asked when the evening fishing starts. Some of the evening fishing is weather (temperature) related. Hendrickson and paralep spinners are apt to fall in the middle of the afternoon (warmest part of the day), in the evening on ...

  Decided to skip the morning search for hatching caddis and Hendrickson spinners and rest up for the Hendrickson hatch and the caddis spinner fall. Tied a few caddis egg layers, did a crossword and a sudoku, made two sandwiches and it was time to go.  Drove up river and there was no way you could count the trailers at the launches without a calculator. The game lands parking lots had a mere five (lower) and eleven (upper) cars, (clearly some wade fishermen are put off by the high releases), normally there would be about ten in the lower lot and at least seventeen in the upstream lot. The WB above Hale Eddy is still sparsely populated. It's always the last stretch to have Hendrickson hatches and everyone knows it, but if you want a piece of water where you don't have to worry about hooking someone on your back cast, it's the place to go. The bugs - I'm somewhere between flummoxed (did anyone know there were two m's lurking in fluMMoxed?) and perplexed, by the bugs. ...

Had a busy day yesterday. Mark was on the road back to Greensboro before 8:00am and I began the process of catching up on things that were neglected during his visit. Broke down the accumulation of boxes in the garage, gathered up the rest of the trash and made a dump run. Mowed the yard for the first time this year and presto it was time to go fishing.  Checked the stream temps and flows as well as the weather forecast, made sure the raincoat was in the car, (severe thunderstorms with high winds and hail were in the forecast for Hendrickson time), and set out fish. Fished the upper WB, which has been the only place where the Hendricksons had not yet made their appearance. Today, with cloud to ground lightning and booming thunder, in modest numbers and for less than an hour, they did. I stayed close to the car and did my count of the time between the lightning and the thunder (five seconds means the lightning is about a mile away). I've always thought that the only important number...

  Back on the river with pearly white teeth after driving home for my annual dentist appointment. Had a nice dinner out with Jean Sunday night, washed both the car and my clothes and was on my way back down by 9:00AM this morning. It's Mark's final day before heading back to North Carolina. He teamed up with my GHOF yesterday and had his best day of the trip hooking seven and landing six. This morning we found bugs (caddis and Hendricksons), but the fish have had so much to eat they seemed indifferent to the smorgasbord Mother Nature was providing. Went up above "Barking Dog" launch on the WB and had a brief flurry of action on Hendricksons about 3:00. It was over by 3:30. We had heard good things about paralep and Hendrickson hatches on the UEB, so we drove over. To put it kindly, the hatch at about 4:00 was sparse and rising fish were hard to find. Drove back to where we first encountered bugs sans fish and more or less saved the day. There were fish going when we g...

This will be short, there's just not much worth talking about.  The weather - It didn't snow! Temp on the porch this morning started at 33. The sun quickly took it up to 60. From there, things went down hill. Clouds rolled in, the "warm" southern wind had all the flags out straight as the temp went from 60 down to 50 during prime hatching time. By 5:00 o'clock everything was shut down, boats were being rowed to the take outs and we were headed to the Lordville Estate. The  bugs - Never happened where we were. Yes there was the occasional Hendrickson and some paraleps hugging the windward bank, but mid- river there was nothing but drift boats, very few of which had people casting. The water levels - Are now ideal for both drifting and wading. The fishing - Not what we hoped for or expected. The hatches were sparse at best. The wade fishermen were virtually non-existent, the drift boats were numerous but created no problems. The wind was fierce in some places but th...