April 14, 2017 – Too Much Time, Too Little Water – Berks County Trout Two Ways

Challenging for a lot of reasons.

I ran out of open water too quickly in Berks County this morning, and I left my phone in the car, to boot, but I landed two lovely, wild browns tossing (flipping, really) an olive bugger with the spinning rod on a tiny limestoner in the Oley Valley before I hit new posted signs.  Time to knock on doors next time I am in the area, I suppose.   Also disappointing is that good stretches of two nearby creeks now require a permit or club membership to fish on the private, although otherwise-unposted, land.  Great for the local TU members and club, I am sure, but not great for license owners in the rest of SEPA who have quietly fished these waters for decades.  I partially blame the Class A lists made public and interactively mapped on the PFBC website a few years ago.  

Got a couple here before I ran out of access.

The interactive maps are a great resource, no doubt, but information that was once shared only by word of mouth or earned by on the ground recon was made open to any mildly tech-savvy angler in the country.  I personally have found many “secret” spots by using those maps as a jumping off point, so I am part of the problem!  I respect the private land, however, and I have travelled miles to find creeks totally off limits, and I left them alone.  It is important to know that these lists promise zero access to the creeks, but I am sure many folks just simply pulled into a roadside cut-off and traipsed through posted land, taking the PFBC lists as endorsements to fish.  And, in their defense, in the early years of this information made so readily accessible, it was an easy assumption to make.   Much harder to grasp: So the PFBC was allowed to survey a watershed by landowners to determine if it sustains a wild population of fish, but this land may or may not be open to fishing???  It’s even more complicated because many of the creeks are not assessed by sampling any longer; they are assessed by informed assumptions about local streams in the same watershed and other scientific methods (some “scientific” too, I am sure).

Still open to fishing even though it's on private land.

Berks, Bucks, Northampton, Lehigh, Lancaster, Chester, Montgomery, honestly most SEPA counties have limestone influenced creeks that were a somewhat secret haven for wild trout enthusiasts, and now most are posted with fresh signs because more than one overeager angler left too big of a footprint or scoffed boundaries and signs.  I was chased from a creek in Bucks County myself this spring when I unwittingly pushed too far into a private farm that probably had bad experiences in recent years.

A pretty brown chewing the walt's worm.

Thankfully, these lovely limestoners eventually feed a still-open stretch of the Manatawny Creek, so my second stop of the morning yielded a bunch of healthy stocked and holdover fish from the walk-in section of the creek.  It was Good Friday, so many fishermen were out, and all tangled with a couple fish.  By really working and concentrating on high stick nymphing, however, I was able to catch an even dozen in a couple hours.  Many were from holes that other dudes left after coming up fishless.  I am not getting cocky—these are stocked fish not size 26 sipping wilds on the Letort—but I am confident that I can get fish out of heavily pressured holes.  It’s amazing what confidence, patience, and a deliberate (often new to the fish) approach can yield!

Another hold-over brown.

A couple of the fish were from the upper end of the creek, so they had great fins and colors.  No doubt they keep moving upstream all summer as the creek warms.  I periodically catch wild fish in the Manatawny, sometimes many of them together, especially in the dead of winter when they tend to seek deep, quiet holes, but the population is climate-related and cyclical, it seems.  One guy I spoke to this morning remarked, I often wonder what the place could be if they stopped stocking?  I have wondered that too.  I have taken a water temp of 70 in July, however, so I am sure it warms up some years, but the Wissy in my neighborhood, for example, will be seventy later this month.  So, I caught a bunch of nice trout in nice surroundings, and I even got to thank a landowner for allowing fishing to continue on the creek.  God bless you, he replied.  But then he had to ask me if the silver pickup parked in his driveway was mine.  It wasn’t, but this highlights the problem.

A good rainbow in nice shape too.

Some inconsiderate citizen/angler parked in a private driveway when public parking was just 400 yards away, and the same dude will cry about shrinking access to private lands in the state.  We are all part of the problems and solutions.  Perhaps my thanking the landowner, which I felt earnestly compelled to do after the disappointing morning in the headwaters of the watershed, bought us all a little time before he starts posting in order to keep pickups out of his drive, worm containers out of his back yard, and flies and spinners out of his lovely, manicured trees and shrubs?  Hell, I may even bring a trash bag next time and clean up a little.

Grateful the access is still granted on this pretty stretch.