March 24, 2018 – Mentored My Youth – Wissahickon Creek

The boy's first trout of 2018 hit a barbless Rapala CD1.

After letting it warm up a bit, and having lunch at Wendy’s, the boy and I tried a couple spots on the Wissy today to mark the SEPA Mentored Youth Day.  The conditions were not perfect, especially for bank fishing, but we caught a couple stocked brownies tossing a Rapala with the barbs pinched down.  The water was a bit high and the ground saturated all around the park, so we had to hose off some muddy sneakers when we got home.  Dad almost wiped out a couple times trying to maneuver around in Converse One Stars.  The mud all around the banks was like brown ice!  We did put on boots after moving to a second spot, and the boots gave us a couple more options as far as getting around and finding a good dry spot from which to cast.

Scenes from Mentored Youth Day, 2018.

I did bring a fly rod rigged up with a green weenie and a small indicator, but in carrying two rods to the first spot, we twisted everything together, so after cutting and trying to untangle, I decided to just focus on the one rod, coaching the boy’s casts and retrieves with the ultralight spinning set up.  Both fish were in soft water close to the far bank, as expected, so eventually Dad helped deliver a couple casts to the prime spots to get some points on the board, but the boy did the rest, including helping with the release (and learning how to release a pair of closed hemostats).  We did see a handful of kids and adults out in the afternoon, and we saw more footprints where folks must have been out earlier, but we saw no abuses of the spirit of the day.  Perhaps if the water and weather conditions are better for the MY day for the rest of the state, we will make a trip with Mom to the mighty Brodhead.  All in all, we had a fun afternoon: lunch, treats, a couple hours of fishing and hiking and getting dirty, and a couple fish that were a decent size and chased a plug this early in the season.  Fish were caught, youth were mentored, and good times were had.