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| A pig, a donkey, just a thick one. |
I got up at 3:15 am today and was on the road to meet Larry at 6 AM in the Lehigh River gorge. I did not roll into my driveway tonight until 10:15 PM, after finishing the day with some dry fly fishing with Tigereye Joe up above White Haven. It was my first trip wet wading, and I don’t recommend wearing wet pants that long to anyone. I could have used some Triple Paste from the diaper bag by 8 PM, but it was worth it. It got pretty hot by 1 PM, so I would not have made it all day in waders, anyway. Fishing was challenging, as it can be on the River, especially with the wild fish, but I had a good day with good company, and I even caught a huge brown on Eric’s big, heavy jig streamer. One major purpose of the morning round was to give Larry a mono-rig lesson, and had he caught some fish, it would have made for a much more successful day. I think we’ve long established that I can be a terrible guide despite my best intentions (just ask my son). Larry can fish and read water, which is half the battle, so he was in the game and would have caught. We picked a heck of day and venue for his lessons, but he wanted this! Honestly, even I had to go into my bag of tricks to get bit today. That huge brown was hugging the bottom in current in a little spot within a spot, and I needed close to a ¼ ounces of tungsten to get Eric’s bugger down to him. Other fish came on the swing, but heavy swinging tungsten bugs, so not many were coming off the bottom while we were in the gorge. I had to figure some stuff out, and even then I had some challenges. I lost another good brown after Larry left, and before that I broke a rod while fighting a fish. It ended up being quite the day and not the one I had planned.
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| Larry doing it all to catch (and photographic evidence he once fished a mono-rig). |
Larry gave it a shot for a couple hours before cutting off the mono-rig and swinging wets and even tossing a big dry. He moved a couple fish that way late in the morning, but I think by then he’d taken such a Lehigh beating that he wasn’t ready when the few opportunities presented themselves. Lord knows, I have been there, and more often than I’d like on big rivers. Even when the water is low and you can move around and get at fish that would be off limits in higher flows, the fish still have to be willing to meet you halfway. They decided to be dicks today. One even made me strip him by hand with mono and the top four feet of my broken 10’6” 4 weight rod. It was like they wanted us to suffer a little. To that end, after Larry and I parted ways about 12:30 PM, and I had a couple hours before I was going to call Joe for our meetup, I returned to a honey hole and caught rainbows and dropped the aforementioned good brown that tentatively took a perdigon on the dropper tag. It was another wide, wild brown too! At least the cooperative rainbows were a good sign that Joe and I had a good chance of getting into fish for the third shift. Joe actually called a little after 2 PM to check on me when I didn’t check in with him. I had intended only to put in an hour and then take a break to prepare for round three, but it was 3 PM before I arrived at our meeting spot. I get more obsessive with figuring stuff out when fishing is tough, and figuring it out only to lose a good fish, well, that makes we stay even longer sometimes!
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| I did catch 8-10 fish early, including some other wild browns, but it was work sometimes. |
Joe had gotten into fish for few evenings, mostly prospecting with big dry flies, but there were hatches happening too. We were hoping to get into a mess of rising fish. True to today’s general character, we encountered very few bugs and only brief flourishes of rising fish. Joe is a better guide than me, however. I got a couple fish prospecting with a stimulator, and then dug up a wild brown and a couple small natives while working through pocket water with a dry dropper. When we ended up in the same hole a while later, Joe suggested an Adams in size 16 ahead of the setting sun. Even with my eyes tired from a long day squinting in the sun, I took his advice and tied on a smaller dry. I trust my casting accuracy, so even blindish I know where my fly lands and have an idea where it’s drifting enough to set when a fish shows. I had a blast targeting a handful of risers in a riffle, and we both had fish eat just fishing the water. If you got a fly in the spot without drag, even for a couple feet of good drift, you had a shot at a trout playing along. I teased Joe that he was getting cocky, calling out spots for me, but he knows this river well. Thankfully, I am competent enough that I did not let him down. I used to do this dry fly thing quite a bit.
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| Joe out there making it look effortless. A quality stocker. |
We arrived too early to catch evening risers, so Joe gave me a walking tour of a couple of holes while we just caught up. It had been since last June since we’d fished together. I recall that was a tough day too. On the tour, Joe pointed out a few places where he noted that if you got a dry close enough to a certain rock or foam line you would get eaten. When we fished close to each other as the night closed, he pointed at some of those spots again, and I executed the plan. He was not wrong about any of the spots, of course. Besides the one wild brown I caught and the dink brookies, Joe caught a decent wild brown and a legal brook trout that certainly looked wild. Where there are tribs with brookies, this happens on the river. Most of the fish were stockers, but they were all on dry flies and fun. Joe and I actually talked about the confusion around chasing buckets dumped at a bridge vs big water, often float-stocked, where fish are spread around and holdover. There are some quality stockie experience in PA, as many of you know: Pine, Brodhead, Bald Eagle, the Tully, and certainly the Lehigh River. And they are not always pushovers. After the challenging morning, I was glad that these stocked fish were cooperative. Despite some sore muscles and the diaper rash, it was a good long day with good company, like a three-day fishing vacation crammed into one.
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| Joe called this my Orvis pose. I had to share with Josh and Brian to prove I own fly line! |