Angler 119's Delaware River Fishing Report

  There is no magic fly, but you are making the task of catching fish much harder if you insist on using the tried and true patterns. Why? Because they look nothing like the real flies the fish are eating. If you are casting flies at rising fish all day long and aren't getting DOZENS of refusals, the fish are telling you something. What? you ask. Fish see everything. If they recognize your fly isn't the real thing from their lie, they may do nothing more than quiver a pectoral fin. You see nothing. To get them to consistently come close enough to the fly for you to recognize a refusal, your flies have to look very much like the real thing. I've gotten push back on this subject in the past. "I catch fish on a comparadun" or "I've done really well on parachutes". Fine, stick with them if you want, but lets be honest, how many Hendricksons have you ever seen with wings attached at right angles to their body? How many March Browns have you seen  dancing ...

  It's 9:30, I just sat down with my Perfect Manhattan and it's a celebratory one. There is no easy way for me to check, but this might well have been the best week I've ever had on the Delaware river system. Today the water on the east side had dropped enough for me to fish there and there was no way I was going to fish anywhere else. Fished for three hours without seeing a boat or another angler. In the first forty-five minutes I was three for seven, (O for three vs the 'bows). Things settled down after that and I ended up well above 50%, with all of the fish being fat as pigs, well rested, and a good number of them, more than I could handle. I'm older than I used  to be (isn't everyone) so at 4:30, when I returned to the car, I decided to drive around for a while, rest up, and fish 7:00 'til dark. Never saw a single boat or fisherman during the drive. Saw quite a few rising fish in relatively hard, (not by any means impossible), places to get to. At 5:30 ...

  With both the BK and EB up from the rain, and higher than I would like to fish them, I took a drive up rte. 30 along the UEB. It's at about 230cfs which is just fine for fishing. There was a stiff breeze blowing up river. Very few anglers were fishing the lower half. From Shinhoppel up there were multiple cars at every parking place. Never saw a rise until the big pool above the old Al's sports shop. The caddis were above Corbett and at 2:50 any Hendricksons were waiting until at least 3:00 to hatch. I left for Deposit. Arrived in Deposit at 3:30 and looked for a place where I could make a backcast without hooking a boat. With the cutback in the release there were wade fishermen everywhere. Drift boats and personal flotation devices (pontoon boats??)  looked like skiers on a slalom course rowing around the waders. Got into the tailout of a pool, and when the boat that was anchored just down stream from a tiny little island below me pulled out, I waded in. It's a good piec...

  Said goodbye to and old friend today. No, not a fishing buddy or a high school pal, it was just an old microwave. Jean paid $10.00 for it at a garage sale over thirty years ago when Candy, our oldest daughter, was going away to college. She used it for four years and then Cory (our youngers daughter), fell heir to it, and used it for the rest of her college days. The microwave's next and final stop was at the "Lordville Estate" on the shelf I built for it in the broom closet just off the kitchen, where for over twenty-five years it popped popcorn, poached eggs (it had a violator's license), reheated coffee, warmed meals, and thawed hamburgers and venison without a single complaint. Drove it to the transfer station  this morning with a heavy heart, dreading having to throw it into the scrap metal pile. To my relief there was a shed for electronics where I gently set it on the floor and sadly walked away. The fishing - For me, has been very, very good. For the past tw...

  Would like to jump into the issues raised by AC who was born and raised on the river and knows more about the river than I could ever hope to.  Many changes came with the building of the Cannonsville dam. The dam has reduced flooding by taking the WB water out of play during heavy rains, except when the reservoir is full. By reducing the flood flows from the WB, there has been a greater opportunity for silt from the tribs to build up in the river, (the WB silt is sitting on the bottom of the reservoir and what will happen to that, I don't need to worry about in my lifetime).  When I first started fishing here I got into the muck at the mud flats just above Balls Eddy and didn't know if my waders and I would make it out. When the three floods, (one 500 year, two 100 year), came just after the turn of the century, the mud flats were gone, so were all the burrowing insects. The floods changed the river bottom. Tens of Thousands of tons of stones and gravel were redistribut...

 It was at least twenty years ago that Paul Weamer told me that March Browns and Gray Foxes had been reclassified as the same species. Maybe they are, but as fly fishermen you need to treat them differently. They are different sizes, different colors and hatch at different times although they do appear on the river during the same calendar period.  The March Brown - For the first fifty-five years I fly-fished, this was one of the two best attractor flies for blind casting trout streams. Why? They are big (size 10/12). They taste good (trout love 'em). They take a long time to get off the water, and they hatch (sporadically or intermittently as trout fishermen like to say), all day long. In the past twenty years of fishing I have watched the March Brown dry fly turn into an afterthought, no more useful than a vestigial organ (it rarely leaves my fly box). How many March Brown duns have you seen eaten by trout in say the last five years? Why? Drift boats and percentages. I'll tr...

  You may not be aware, but we at Angler 119's Delaware River Fishing Reports, spare no expense to insure our readers always get the best, most up to date, river fishing information, presented in the clearest and most readable form possible. In furtherance of this goal we added a grammarian to our staff this year for the purpose of ferreting out any words that may have been used inappropriately by our staff writers. The addition paid off immediately when the new staffer discovered the missing "s" in descent in "The first trip down" which was just the second post of the year. The April 24th post, "Too much of nothin' - - " was also upgraded when our ever watchful grammarian converted "peaked" into "peeked" which is what I did when looking into the blue bird house. Alas, nothing is perfect, and I, as the author of the May 9th "Sometimes the fish won't leave you alone" offering, must take exception to the grammarian...