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| Maybe next week, Valley. |
I am back to work next Tuesday, and this past Wednesday
was a bust close to home on Valley, which is not iced up anymore but still very
cold from the melt, so I decided to head far enough west this morning to get
beyond the snow and ice. When I headed
to State College on Tuesday, even though the Susquehanna was frozen, Lancaster,
York, and Dauphin Counties looked more welcoming, with little snow on the
ground to melt in the warm weather today (and tomorrow) and turn the fish off
the feed. I have had Cordorus Creek on
my winter fishing list, as it is a tailwater fishery coming out of Lake Marburg
(and looks like is may have some spring influence too), so I took a two hour
drive today to fish four hours on a new creek. I am not sure the Codorus is
worth the ride, when I could be fishing the Lewistown creeks in 2.5 hours and
State College in 3, but I may return if I am in Harrisburg or Dauphin with
Kenny chasing bass, for example, or going to the sportsmen’s show or
something. It holds a similar place on
my list as the Manada Creek out near Ft. Indiantown Gap, I guess: glad I saw it, caught some fish, may come back,
but it won’t be a destination trip at that distance from home.
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| A nice little creek with many, many improvements (not pictured here). |
I found some easy parking when I arrived, but as I worked
upstream, I had my doubts about this little, limestoner-looking creek. The water temperature and color showed that
it had not totally escaped the effects of snow and ice melt, for one. In addition, the stretch I began exploring was
a muddy mess, with quicksand bottom and down timber everywhere, wide, shallow,
and pretty flat. I kept hoofing, often
out of the water, looking for better water, and eventually the environs
starting looking troutier. I picked up
two and bounced another fish tight against a down tree with a little current
adjacent. The fish were really gorgeous
little browns. My first was maybe 8
inches, but the second was a nice little fish for a small creek, maybe 11 or 12
inches.
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| Definitely pretty fish, and some respectable ones mixed in with the little guys. |
I was fortunate enough to run into some nice looking
water after even more walking, but it looked enhanced by a loving TU group, plenty
of log diverters and homemade cross-vanes and bank restoration. Fittingly enough, I also ran into a nice guy
named Frank from the local chapter (who also stuck two nice fish, one 14
inches) who offered a lot of good information about his home waters.
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| Shown some love. |
Besides letting me have a shot at the series of plunge pools upstream from us, where I did hook another fish, he even went as far as to offer to drive me to the next section of the creek that he was going to fish and even show me a couple other spots. I would have taken him up on it for sure, but it was
getting close to quitting time for me (and you may recall from above that I had
sort of filed this creek away and didn’t want to waste anyone’s time on his prized home waters), so I declined but hopefully still showed my appreciation
for the kind gesture. With a little more
intel now, I hoofed it back down the road to where I had parked and found a
some better looking water a short ways downstream from the pull-off. It was getting late if I wanted to be home
even close to bus stop time for the boy so, of course, the last 20 minutes of
my day produced three more fish in short order.
They all took a zebra midge tied as a dropper above a heavier san juan
worm (which got only one taker all day but did its job of keeping my rig in the
strike zone on a creek with a deceptively steep gradient).
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| The basic zebra midge did the trick. |
Despite wasting a lot of time in what Frank and his guys
called dead water (I did catch three live fish there, though!) I ended up
finding about 6 fish on new water. Most
were 8 to 10 inches, but the one fish was decent, and they were all beautiful
and leapers, too. The takes were very
subtle, and I am out of practice with the indicator, so I did swing and miss on
a few fish too, but that go-to winter style of fishing did come back to me
eventually. It was a really warm day for
January, so I was fishing without a jacket and with the ventilation of a
trucker hat, so my light thermals didn’t swamp up the, uh, intergluteal cleft,
so to speak, which can happen even in January, at least with me. Warm and possible rain on Friday, so who
knows!
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| A little jewel. The tail fin like a windowpane! |
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