August 12, 2022 – Still No Real Rain but at Least a Cool Down Made for a Pleasant Morning – Little Lehigh Creek

A pristine predawn beauty.

I had very low expectations this morning, and because it was a Friday in the summer I steered clear of the obvious spots, but I managed to land five trout during the early shift, including a couple on a micro bugger before sunrise.  In fact, the first fish I caught, the only wild brown, required the flash on my phone in order to document its capture. I also fooled a really beauty rainbow on the micro-bugger a few minutes before official sunrise.  The water temperature was still hanging up around 64 degrees, even after a cool night, so it took what felt like no time to hit 66 around 10 AM, which is when I decided to call it good.  Besides the pair of bugger fish, I got one rainbow on a size 14 stimulator dry.  The remaining two took a size 18 waltz tied off the hook of the dry fly.  For a while, perhaps too long, I tried every trick I had in me hoping to fool a very active rainbow in one deep hole.  The thing was 18 inches and showed herself at least three times.  I thought she might be chasing emergers, and then maybe I thought she was harassing fry of some kind, but it got too late and too sunny and warm to give the final experiment a legit try.  She may have been eating scuds or shrimp free-swimming at the edge of a weed bed.  I was purposely fishing near a spring, even to get only 64 to start, so there were a couple rafts of weeds in the vicinity.  I never did figure it out, not this morning, anyway.  I did fool a 19-inch brown in the same hole last year on a walts, I believe.  This was definitely a bow, though.

Low water, a little male? a dry fly eater.

It was a beautiful morning once the sun got up.  A little North breeze dried the wet wading pants in a matter of minutes.  I fished the stocked trout water as a way to avoid the trico chasers, and I even explored some new stretches that may or may not be open to fishing.  They were not posted is all I can say.  Not that mid-August is prime time for such exploration, but I can assure you that I did not find a secret honey hole loaded with all those wild browns and rainbows that are becoming scarcer in the pressured areas.  I did catch two bows today, and one last time too, that had all the markings of a wild fish.  Even the tail on the second fish I caught this morning was perfect and showed no clear signs of regrowth.  It was a long and skinny fish too, like many of its browner kin, not a corn-fed plumper that escaped from a cement pond and had an atrophied peduncle from an involuntary crash diet.  There is no way to know really, but I do think I have seen a slight uptick in wild rainbows in the SEPA limestoners.  I heard on good authority that they can adapt and fall spawn, again like their browner cousins, instead of spring spawn.  I am fond of browns, but when a rainbow is wild or at least thinks he or she is, they are hot fish.  Even in 64-65 degree water, they don’t even quit in the net.

One wild brown in the dark, ducklings eating those scuds, a "loved" stocker.

There were a smattering of tricos, but the handful of rises I saw this morning looked like opportunistic rises to terrestrials not steady sips.  Nothing developed that made me feel the need to clip off the stimmy and dropper, and the water got too warm for my liking too fast, especially with such low flows.  Fish are not taking refuge in riffles, which are really shallow right now.  Instead, they are sort of doing the winter thing and going deep once the sun is up.  The last two trips out, however, I have seen enough predawn activity in tailouts and flats to entertain a night trip or two.  Keeping my options open, I also rigged up a couple bass rods last week, and the boy wouldn’t mind heading to the beach, either.  The water temps in the surf were ridiculously chilly this week, but that may change.  For this morning, though, this was almost enough.  I would have liked one or two more fish to eat the dry, or for one of my walks to reveal a honey hole hidden in plain sight in some suburban backyard, but it was hard to be disappointed with just being outdoors this morning after the previous 10 or more days of pretty swampy conditions.