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| Pretty redband bow. |
My wife and son had plans on Saturday to meet with some
friends, so I had most of the day for an adventure, at least until dinner time
when we had plans to eat in Conshy. The snow, followed
a couple days later by a mild day, had me excited to try NEPA for my first native brookies of the year or maybe some Lehigh Valley wild browns? Then, about 8 PM on Friday night, I got a
text from Eric: “You want to wet a line tomorrow?” Well, I let him talk me into staying closer
to home because he had a much shorter window to fish today.
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| Zebra mitch... |
I ran through a list of streams that we could fish and
landed on Ridley Creek in the Fly Fishing Only section since it was one of the
few creeks within 30-45 minutes that I haven’t fished in recent months. Eric should be glad we did, as he definitely
caught a couple more fish than me… mitch!
He’d never fish the creek, so I was guiding for free, as often happens
with my buddies and me. I do all the
hard work, I tell you! I guess there are
worse things than putting friends on fish and fishing the state park is hardly
work, I suppose. In the end, we had a successful,
leisurely, picturesque three hours with some nice rainbows to show for it. I will let Eric slide on this one (but not without of few mitches thrown in).
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| One of Eric's 6 or 7 on the zebra midge. |
As is often the case, the limited parking at Ridley was
filling up by the time we arrived at 10:30 AM.
We did manage a spot near the bridge, so we started at the pool where
everyone starts, with predictable results: a couple tentative nibbles on the zebra
midge by pressured October stockies.
Eric explored up to the falls but found shallow water this time of
year. When he came back down, I took him
down to a couple holes downstream, and we each got on the board with nice sized
rainbows. The measure net had both near
13 or 14 inches and fat. The ones that
have been in there a while have a rich, dark color, many with the distinct
redband like the one pictured at the top of the post and in the net.
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| A fat 13 incher |
The honey hole was a
bit tight for two guys to fish, so we eventually moved downstream again. When I took a water temperature at a deep
bend where I usually catch fish, the thermometer read 37 degrees in the sandy
shallows. I was not surprised, then,
that the fish I caught here barely registered movement on a small indicator. The best thing about catching a fish or two
here was that I was on the bank with my cold feet out of the water! Eric is not a big fan of fishing those slow
winter holding holes, and he had success in some faster pockets upstream, so I followed
behind him as he returned to the honey hole.
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| The guide was allowed to catch a few too! |
Since it had warmed
up, fish were responding better to the nymphs.
We saw some midges rising, but with the snow melt, the creek was muddy,
so fish must have been eating the emergers while still hunkered near the
bottom. Once in a while, I could see the
tell-tale flashing of white mouths of trout or the full body flash of suckers
and chubs eating. By the time we quit
before 1:30 PM, fish even hit the hare’s ear or pheasant tails in size 18 that
we were using to get the 20 and 22 zebra midges down in the strike zone.
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| Winter fishing at its picturesque best. |
While we had the place to ourselves in the morning, by
midday we were starting to see other anglers fishing and walking around, so we didn’t bother working further upstream towards the Subaru (Talk about guiding, I
even drove!) and, instead, called it quits.
Before we left, Eric let me sneak into the honey hole to try and close
the gap in the fish tally, but by then I think he had tagged every fish in
there, maybe even the ones we caught the first time through. It was a good day, catching close to a dozen
between us, and I got home long before my wife and the boy, so I even got a
short nap before going out to eat some high-end soul food. All the nearby special regulations creeks
will be getting fish from the PFBC around the third week of this month, so more
winter stockie fishing to come, at least until my spring break in March...
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| Picking pockets in the snow. |
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