July 4, 2023 – Between Meringue and Tejano, a Little Peace and a Mixed Bag of Fishes – Wissahickon Creek

Quite the variety on a brief evening walk.

With the holiday landing on a Tuesday, I didn’t really make any big plans for the Fourth.  My wife is a vegetarian, anyway, so I did not even have to grill.  I was basically on standby to drive the boy where he needed to go.  After a lazy morning and afternoon mostly around the house, I decided to brave the mighty Wissy with a dry dropper for some panfish and maybe some bass around sunset.  I picked a spot out of convenience to my house and proximity to good bass water, not fully considering picnicking all that much.  I found easy parking at an access just over the border in the City where I have trout fished since I was 10, I bet, and more recently I have found that some smallmouth are hanging on due to remaining decent habitat.  The weather was looking iffy, so a few families were packing out their grills and chairs and lawn games, but a few were hanging in there.  I could hear the insistent Latin beats when I pulled into the spot, so I knew I would have a soundtrack to this wet wading excursion. 

Good spots for a swim?

I did a short hike across a meadow by the stables and made my first few casts with a stimulator and a sunken ant on the dropper.  It did not take long to encounter a big smiley Dominican dude and his kid in underpants cooling off in the crick!  Dude told me he had seen a big golden fish earlier in the day, and the kid got all excited when I landed the first couple of sunfish, but I did not want a half-naked audience, so I moved further downstream towards the next access point.  I did note that the golden fish was probably a trout, even though the water was close to 80 degrees by now.  I actually thought another party was going on with how loud the music seemed to be and how far the sound was carrying from the next parking lot.  As I fished my way down, I eventually realized it was just a couple blasting Tejano while they floated in rafts like it was their backyard pool.  A lot of noise for two people!  The fish didn’t seem to mind.  As the sun got lower, and I switched to a dropper dropper with a dry then a soft hackle and then a weenie hanging below, I picked up a bunch of panfish.  Rock bass, sunfish of a couple varieties, smallmouth bass, including one decent one about 10-11 inches, and even four surprise trout ate.  Two of them I caught targeting a pod of risers, and they took the soft hackle as the dry did a swing in front of them.  Like earlier this month in another county, some of these little fellas looked like they were TIC stocks.   Maybe they let them go near the end of the school year or something?  Or they might have been just the right size from the PFBC buckets to survive this long.  I did catch a real sized rainbow too.

They loved my weenie.

I knew it was weenie time of the year, and besides those risers, fish favored the weenie, especially when it landed under overhanging tree branches.  Even the bass ate the weenie, including the only one that was not panfish-sized.  It was starting to get dark, and I did not know if I had any water downstream of the raft crew, especially water that was not all muddied up now, so I hiked out by about 8:30, probably a bit before magic hour for that big stimmie to get eaten with more gusto.  With the humidity and the water so warm, it was hardly a way to cool off, but it was still a good little diversion under ten minutes from home.  This was not the year I thought I would encounter holdover trouts in the Wissahickon Creek in July either, but it’s been a strange year.  Up until recently, low water but rather cool daytime air temperatures, so maybe not all that surprising?