October 17, 2021 – Be Careful What You Wish For – Northampton County Limestoner

Wayward stockers, chilly temps, and Karen.

After a warm and humid period, the fall chill arrived all at once this morning.  It felt great, but trout generally do not like drastic changes in temperature and pressure, even if the change will have longer positive effects.  Looking at a busy start to the week, I decided I was going out on Sunday for a few hours regardless.  I was hoping for more precipitation on Saturday than we actually received.  It was not all that much and seemed concentrated closer to Philly and South.  Valley on a Sunday is never on my bucket list, and it was already coming back down to normal in the morning, so I drove to Northampton County instead.  I have fished this one post-Ida, and it has changed a little, but there are signs that things will be okay here.  I actually caught three or four YOY and a couple fish from last year’s brood.  They were the only rewards for my efforts for the first hour or more.  It was chilly and a little breezy, but it felt good to me and the lone hiker I encountered, bundled up and leaning into the wind. It was sunny too, so I assumed the sun might wake up some bugs by late morning.  I ran out of real estate before I saw caddis starting to get active when I was quitting at 11 AM, but there were midges in the air early.  All the dinks took a perdigon on the dropper tag, a size 18 olive and black, reinforcing the perils of fishing small bugs this time of year.

Perils of tiny perdigons and midges.

I worked hard at one favorite hole where I can usually count on at least one fish.  Changing the two bug rig with the perdigon dropper to a single caddis larva, I dug one that barely fought out of a plunge .  It was a pretty and bright but criminally skinny rainbow.  I catch like one rainbow every two years in this creek, like literally one, and the last time was a club-tagged monster over 20 inches long.  These floods definitely moved some fish.  The scary tiger trout last outing, now this, and it got worse today.  With the sun warming another favorite hole that was disappointing the first time through, I dredged this second spot with the caddis larva.  I was saying to myself, there has to be a fish in this one seam, even if it’s a frigging sucker.  I have tangled with my friend Karen the white sucker here at least 5 times—five times that I landed her, that is—finned, chinned, spooked an additional 5 times in the last 5 years.  As slow as it was, I was thinking, come on Karen!  Careful what you wish for, as Karen did eat the bug and ranged all over the hole for a minute before rolling in the net.  

Big old stocker in the 20s...

The odds of catching a wild brown now that Karen and I had muddied up the hole were slim, but I dropped a couple more casts in the same sweet spot anyway.  I hooked another big fish that started out acting like a sucker, but then she began do trout things.  For one, she had more than one run in her before giving up.  Two, she ran into the shallows on the other side of the creek twice trying to dislodged the hook.  Three, she tried to leave this hole and go upstream.  All this was in slo-mo relative to how a similarly sized wild fish would have acted, so I was not surprised to see this long brown castaway during one of those runs (well, jogs) into shallow water.  It was kind of fun because she was so big, maybe 23 inches, but it was hardly as hair-raising as if the same sized wild fish had eaten the caddis larva.  A rainbow is one thing, but now a big stocker brown taking up residence in a prime lair?  I released her, as I did the tiger last week, but it crossed my mind to take them home.  I guess, in the end I was grateful for the action on a slow morning, and maybe I had willed this to happen by invoking the name of low energy Karen.  Chances are these stockies won’t make the winter, anyway, and they have provided a post-summer storm novelty that I should have expected.

Better days ahead now that fall has finally arrived, I hope.