Angler 119's Delaware River Fishing Report

  Let me be clear about a few things. First of all fall fishing can be very good, if most people are hunting, watching football games or working on their honey do lists. Why? The browns are busy spawning, which takes a huge percentage of the river's fish out of the game. The hatches are mostly very small flies and don't compare with the blanket hatches of big bugs seen in the spring. You are mostly fishing for rainbows and juvenile browns. When there is an onslaught of fishermen, the fish that are rising, quickly learn to let the duns go and eat emergers in the water column. Today, the number of anglers on the EB and BK, (didn't look anywhere else), was for the second half of October, simply unbelievable. Every fishing access lot was filled with cars, there were multiple fishermen in every pool on both the EB and BK that I drove by, trailers were lined up at every takeout. Simply stated, I couldn't find a place to fish, IN THE MIDDLE OF OCTOBER! What did I do? Broke my ...

Woke this morning to find the backyard covered with frost. Thermometer on the back porch read 30. Waited until 10:30 to resume the peach tree pruning saga. Happy to report that tree #3 is now finished. Will go back and "touch up" trees one and two, now that I have viewed several peach tree pruning videos. Thankfully, I have lots of helpers on the project. The peach leaves are still green but lots of them come loose during the pruning process. Yesterday six deer helped clean up and today the number swelled to nine. There won't be a peach leaf left in the yard tomorrow morning Skipped the lower WB and it's "green tinted" water and arrived at a pool on the EB higher up than I've been fishing, promptly at 3:00. Maybe a tad early, but there were some bugs and I saw a couple fish rise before my phone rang, it was a return call from a "How'd you do?" call I'd made earlier. While I was talking, I saw four more fish rise. Waded in, got in positi...

  Drove Jean to the airport at 4:30 AM for her trip out to Fargo, North Dakota. Was back to the house by 5:30. Had an early breakfast, packed up the car and headed for Lordville. Wasn't halfway there when Jean called to say she was in Chicago and ready to board the flight to Fargo after getting her exercise by first going to gate B22 and then having to go to gate F14 due to a gate change. Temp in the 30's all the way down. Stopped at the Troutfitter and Dave said there was a frost there last night. Arrived in Lordville too early to mow the wet lawn, so I started in pruning the third peach tree. First branch let me know that the tree wasn't happy being pruned, whacked me in the face drawing blood  on my cheek and ear. The deer were delighted that I was throwing down branches for them to chew on and within fifteen minutes there were six of them eating peach tree leaves and branches. Undaunted by my previous bad advice on where and when to fish, the Assoc. Eds. beat me to the ...

  It's 7:00 o'clock Sunday night and I'm in Lafayette. Had planned on coming down today and fishing until Wednesday. Have to be here early Thursday morning to get Jean to the airport. She's leaving me - again - to go out to Fargo N.D. to watch our granddaughter play volleyball. Our daughter is joining her and they will get to see six games in the 10 days they are there. Why didn't I go down to Lordville? At 11:00 this morning the temp in Hancock was 43 degrees. Pseudos and isos like it cold and if they hatched, I might well have missed an epic fishing day, but tomorrow is supposed to be just as cold with winds from the WNW at 15 to 20 mph and I decided to sit home in front of the fire. With rain/snow in the forecast for Wednesday, and some deer finally showing up on my trail cams, my departure will probably be delayed until after dropping Jean off at the airport Thursday morning. Took the time today to look back over the last two months of blog comments and I found ...

  Worked on my camp closedown list, and pruned one limb and several branches off the peach tree nearest the road while waiting for the grass to dry, then mowed the lawn. Finished up by 12:30, too early to go fishing, so I cleaned up, ate lunch, did a crossword and a sudoku, and at 2:00 I got in the car and went fishing. The options are limited. The WB, if possible, is getting muddier every day, to call it anything but muddy is a lie. The big river at Junction Pool has two sides, brown and black. Brown is of course the WB water and the black water is the gin clear EB water. With the sun so low in the sky the clear water looks black. The Willow and the BK are so low that only Ed S. can catch fish there. The UEB release is at 700cfs, the water is in the 40's, the wading is difficult, it's a brown trout stream, (and they are about to spawn), pseudos will be hatching, and fish will probably be up eating them, but I won't be there. Why? The fish will mostly be 1.5 year old browns...

  Truth be told, I'm sick of fishing in muddy water. Today I went east. The BK is so low, (77cfs), that there was no one fishing, except me. In the fall I look forward to fishing the BK which has excellent iso and pseudo hatches. Picked a long deep pool, walked up to where the riff dumps in and didn't see a single iso husk on any of the streamside rocks. Fished during prime pseudo time and never saw a pseudo or a rising fish. Unless we get some rain, I'll fish clean water elsewhere. Heading back towards Hancock, I decided to stop where I encountered the boat anchored and fishing to rising trout a week or so ago, and I'm glad I did. Today there were three boats, (there were only two last time), but today I beat them to the pool. When I walked through the cane and came out on the river bank there were bugs on the water and rising fish. Looked up river and there were boats. Got in the pool and when each of the first two boats came by I had a fish on. There weren't a lo...

  When last Friday looked like a replay of Thursday's bugless adventure, I packed it in and headed for home. I was hobbling around on a bruised foot that just might have been caused by walking up and down streamside rocks in a pair of felt bottomed neoprene booties with felts worn paper thin from the seasons fishing. Found a pair of new, (twenty year old),  wading boots on a shelf in the basement and wore them today. Bruised foot feels good, and the new felt bottoms made walking on the algae covered rocks a piece of cake. On the trip down I drove over, or by, numerous road kills. Squirrels and Porcupines never seem to cross the road safely, but each fall dead racoons and skunks seem to be the most common victims, (until the deer rut). Two dead skunks were on the road before I even got to I-81. Several members of a racoon family were scattered along route 17, as was a possum that wasn't "playing dead", and what appeared to be a yearling, (not a cub), black bear. Also s...