December 13, 2019 – At Least this Kind of Weather Keeps Most Fishermen At Home – Tulpehocken Creek

A little brown, a little high, a little gray, and a little wet today.

I am starting to miss the wild trout, but I was not ready to trample inadvertently over recently-abandoned redds or stand in the rain and drag some midges through deep holes.  I taught last night, so I knew I would sleep too late to hit the tide right at the beach.  Instead, I had the idea that walking with a streamer would be less tedious and dreary than standing in the rain watching an indicator.  I have fished in some form of precipitation the last three times I have been out, which I don’t hate, especially if I have the psychological edge of remaining active and moving, but it took me until 10 AM to leave the house this morning, so my motivation was still a bit low, I suppose.  I wrote down two spots last night before bed, and the second was the Tully.  Honestly, I am not a huge fan of the Tully, but I make a few trips each year because it gets stocked heavily and thoroughly.  It is also a Keystone Select DHALO for a portion, and the TCO store in Reading even stocks brown trout fingerlings.  Heck, there are even a few wild ones in there from two tributaries with wild reproduction.  There are also a lot of places to fish, so if it is crowded, as it often is, there is always somewhere to go to get some space and possibly find fish.  The crowds are one reason I am not a fan, so I often pick bad weather days, cold, rain, high water, Tuesdays, anything to give me a little elbow room.  Besides being a Friday, today certainly fit the bill.

A few pretty little browns on the big olive bugger.

As I said above, I did not get motivated to leave the house for the hour ride to the creek until 10 AM.  By that time, the rain had started to move in, but it was more like isolated showers and a sprinkle or two on the drive out.  The temps were moderate for mid-December, hovering around 40 to 45 degrees.  Those lighter rain conditions lasted the first hour on the water, and then it started to become steadier around midday.  I fished from 11 to 3, and I landed 8 fish, so it was not a bad late fall fishing day, but my last 5 fish were on nymphs under an indicator.  Do the math, and you will notice that my streamer plan netted only three fish.  I had plenty of bumps on a big olive bugger, but only three committed.  I tried smaller, a black bugger half the size, a smaller olive one, but got no love, so I put the one getting noticed back on the leader and gave it a go for as long as I could.  My first three fish were little browns, one perhaps even a wild one.  Another one pictured here that I landed on an SJ worm was also not marked like a typical stockie, but one or all could have been part of the fingerling stockings too.  They were all roughly the same size too, which is no help.

Had to use the SJ worm to dig up the next three fish.

I did not see another soul out in these conditions, which was a huge upside and the only real indication that my plan was effective.  I had a feeling this would prove to be true, so I had packed two rods, my streamer rod and my nymphing rod.  I figured I could work downstream with the streamer, and if I did well, call it good.  Assuming I would have all the real estate I wanted, if the streamer was a total bust, I could walk back to the car to get the long rod and then nymph upstream from another parking lot.  While I had three fish and some action with the bugger, it was kind of a bust, but it was also raining pretty steadily, and I had already waded pretty aggressively downstream trying every little pocket and piece of structure, so I was feeling lazy by the time I clipped off the bugger for good.  The idea of wading aggressively again in order to tightline nymph this larger creek got less attractive the wetter and colder I got.  Instead, I paused under a bridge and rigged up a tapered leader and some small bugs to drop-shot under an indicator.

I caught two at the end on an actual fly, I promise.

Well, that did not last long.  No hits and I lost both bugs in a spot too deep to retrieve them.  When I rigged up again, I went in the opposite direction.  This time I decided to drop-shot a big San Juan worm and target the deeper soft spots close to fast runs and structure.  That worked out well, and I landed three more fish, including the brown I mentioned and a couple rainbows that were a bit bigger than the browns.  Fish were in soft spots behind boulders and large rocks, and those places collect sticks for a living, so I eventually lost the worm too.  For the last deep hole near the parking spot, I tied on a size 10 soft hackle pheasant tail jig to get down really deep.  That big bug landed two more rainbows before I decided to quit for the afternoon.  It would have been nice to stick a dozen on the streamer, but the water is cold in mid-December, of course, so I will take 8 fish any way I can get them.  I especially enjoyed the rare moment of solitude on the popular Tully.

Numbers 7 and 8 were better bows that took the size 10 anchor fly.