Creek Addict

I went to Black Earth Creek under the assumption that it was going to be some super technical, super tough stream. I guess the super slow, low water added a slight bit of technicality to the fishing, but overall, this place was a cake walk. I think I’ve said this about almost every stream since fishing French Creek in Iowa. This place was FULL of fish. It was gorgeous. It was fun. I will be back, for sure. A friend of a friend, who is now a friend, went with me to check this place out. We both fished a mixture of nymphs and/or dries and both came away with a good number of fish. He lost one that was maybe 14-16 inches…but other than that, all the fish we caught were pretty small. It seemed like if you caught one in any specific run/pool/riffle, they were stacked up like cord wood.

Check out some of the pretty pictures….

Alex’s BEAST!

Another one of Alex’s fish.

Sharp hooks…

This was about the average size of the fish I was catching.

Buttery gold.

Perfect looking fish!

Alex doing work.

Lots of fish live here…

There are a couple of midwestern dudes blogging about fishing in Wisco that sound like they can’t buy a bite. (Seeking Trout) I told them I could teach them not to suck, but I haven’t heard from them.

Andy, who apparently has James Ford Disorder, bet me a dozen flies that I would suck when I went fishing in Wisconsin. His buddy Alex went along for the ride to make sure I didn’t suck. I didn’t suck. Because I’m fucking awesome. I’ll post pictures of me holding some little trout soon…

I was pretty sure his flies were going to look like furry dog shit hooks, but they are actually pretty nice. Thanks for the flies, cock face. My mail lady truly appreciates fine art, and you sir, are a regular Bob Ross.

So…. I haven’t posted anything in a while. That doesn’t mean I’m not fishing. I just kind of got tired of being a gay ass fly fishing blogger.


Here’s Nick, Fishing in Iowa.

Oh look, there he is again, catching a fish, in Iowa.

Here’s me, holding a fish, in Iowa.

Oh, look, I’m holding another fish!

Here’s Nick, holding a wild rainbow, in Iowa.

Nick. Fish. Iowa.

Fish eat at night, too.

Pretty pictures…

So…yeah. Blah blah blah, I love fly fishing. Fish are cool and we should be nice to them, etc. My pictures are good, and I’m good at fly fishing.

The end.

I wanted to fish last weekend but couldn’t get any of the usual suspects to come out with me. Jamie and Jay both had to work and poor Kyle is probably never going to be able to fish New Jersey again because he’s moving to Montana. He’s giving up Taylor Ham for Bull Trout….boohoo! All I knew was that I was going somewhere to fish when I woke up on Saturday before my alarm went off. I was struggling with ideas…Catskills are just a little too far for a solo mission, and nothing really piqued my interest in the Croton Watershed on this particular day.

As I sat and thunk about it for a few minutes I remembered that Saturday was the annual Musconetcong Watershed cleanup. I heard about it through Brian Cowden, the Musconetcong Home Rivers Initiative Director for Trout Unlimited. In this role Brian coordinates all sorts of activities on the “Musky” from cleanups like this one to dam removal projects and habitat restoration and improvements. You can read more about the Initiative and Brian’s accomplishments here.

So, finally the plan crystalized. I would go and volunteer to pick up trash and then go do some fishing afterward. About an hour later I was standing around bsing with a bunch of guys at the Sand Bar Park in Hackettstown, getting ready to go pick up some trash. We split into 2 groups and headed off to different sections of the river.

Right off, I spotted a tire in the river that I wanted to get my hands on. The thing was massive, filled with mud and water, and very satisfying to remove from the river (though it appeared to be habitat for some cased caddis). It took all three of us about 15 minutes to roll it to the bank where we left it til the rest of the crew showed up later and helped us roll it up into the trailer. I honestly think the thing weighed 300-400 pounds.

Between the three of us we pulled a lot of garbage out of the river and between all 6 of us I think we managed to gather about a ton of refuse.

We even found some interesting examples of New Jersey ingenuity. I’ve heard of recycling beer cans but this was not what I had in mind.

We called it quits on the cleanup around 1:00pm just in time to go fishing. Brian, Roy and I headed over to a spot where Brian had recently finished a bunch of habitat restoration. They removed a dam, placed boulders and improved the channel creating several hundred feet of prime trout habitat where once there was a slow, warm impoundment. I realized when I got there in the morning that I forgot all but one of my reels at home. Often times I will just leave my gear in the car so that I don’t forget stuff. But when I park on the streets in Brooklyn sometimes I get worried that one of those fly fishing petty criminals will bash my window in to take my reels and rods. At least I had a reel, but it was rigged with a long-line euro-nymphing leader and we were staring at a beautiful pool with rising fish. FML

I watched Brian make a few casts and before long he had one of the risers on a sparkle pupa. Another tough day at the office!

I moved upstream to a spot where Brian and his crew (a stream channel excavation expert from Montana) had created a riffle into a deep hole about 6-7 feet deep. It looked to me like a good spot to nymph and Brian assured me there would be fish in there. After a couple of drifts I had a fat holdover brown on the end of my line.

Much to my satisfaction he took one of my recently tied biot-bodied march brown nymphs.

Roy made a new friend while trying to get a sporadic riser to take his fly.

After a while we decided to check out some other spots on the river and see what was going on. I had only fished the Point Mountain TCA once before so I was excited to check it out. Lots of nice looking water there.

Fish were rising steadily in every spot we stopped but figuring out what they wanted took a while. There were plenty of caddis about but they didn’t show much interest in Elk Hair Caddis patterns. I switched over to a CDC emerger pattern with a tailing shuck and this seemed to draw some interest. Too bad I lost in in a tree after a couple of casts and didn’t have any more in my box. Luckily my next fly, a Size 16 Loopwing Emerger proved to be the fly of the day. Three LDRs, a couple of missed takes and finally I had managed to land a nice bow. Oh also, as you can see from this picture – I found some snazzy old man glasses during the cleanup. They’re not polarized but they do have glass lenses, and they look dumb as hell. My fiancee won’t let me out of the house with them on. Perfect!

Good color for a jersey stocker, sometimes they can be pretty grey.

All in all it was a great day. Hung out with some great people, made new friends, and did some good work for the Musky.

Following up on my last post, the family all headed to New Hampshire for my grandmother’s funeral and while we were there my dad and I decided to make the most of the weather and do some blue-lining in the area around my grandparents’ house. I guess its not really blue-lining since my dad fished all these streams as a kid, riding around on his bike during his school vacations and dunking worms wherever he found likely trout habitat. So when we got up at 6am and went fishing on Friday the morning of the funeral, it wasn’t exactly picking a blue line on the map and heading to it sight unseen. But a lot can change on a trout stream in 40+ years so we didn’t know whether we’d find fish. Now this is really small water, classic brook trout habitat. We were fishing just below a gorge section that the brook carved through the granite ridgelines that run through the area. It was a favorite spot of his during his childhood. While the gorge is protected from development, a lot of development had occurred in the upstream areas of the watershed since then. So we knew that it used to hold fish but couldn’t be sure whether it still did.

I spotted a nice looking bend in the brook from up on the hill as we were rigging up. So we headed down to check it out. I started blind casting a stimulator/pheasant tail dry/dropper rig in the tailout of the bend pool. Working in under the trees and testing the banks to see if any brookies were present and hungry. I still can’t believe there was nobody home in this pool…

My dad, ever an optimist, skipped the dropper fished a stimulator only. He worked upstream from me right where the water spilled in over a riffle into the deep slot at the head of the bend pool.

After about 30 secs I heard him yell out “I got a take!” so I went up to watch. Next cast, another take….and another missed hookset. In all fairness to dad, it had been a while since he fished dries and these little fish were smacking it as soon as it hit the water so there wasn’t much time to prepare. On the second missed hookset, his fly flew out of the water and into the tree branch hanging over head. We managed to get the fly out but spooked the fish in the process. We headed upstream to explore some more, planning to return to this spot on the way back.

Upstream we found some nice riffle/run sections and started working the water. Almost immediately I heard him yell “Got one!” I turned to look, expecting a dink and was surprised by a decent looking fish thrashing in the riffle on the end of his line. I ran up, netted the fish and snapped a pic.

Not a bad fish for this tiny stream.

We worked our way upstream a little more but did not raise any more fish. Before long it was time to head back to the house where my grandfather was making breakfast – as he has on every one of my visits for the past 32 years. We ate, put on our suits and headed up to the church for the service.

Definitely going to fish this spot next time I am in town.

On Saturday we went out fishing with my dad’s cousin Jeff. We started out on the Souhegan River, which is one of the larger trout streams in the region.

There were a few bugs active – stoneflies based on the one my dad squished on the back of his neck. But the fish were not interested, water temps being the likely culprit. They’re still a couple of weeks behind us in terms on unseasonably good trout fishing. After some uneventful prospecting with woolly buggers and Jeff dunking worms, we decided to try smaller streams where, even if we didnt find trout at least we’d find some scenery. Boy did we ever! The stream we ended up fishing was gorgeous, and looked really fishy. Unfortunately we did not even spook a fish in several hours of hiking and fishing. Anyway here are some pics from the stream.

The fact that this spot did not produce any fish has me scratching my head. Maybe the beaver pond upstream warmed the water too much last summer? Or maybe the fish are still in their winter lies…

I woke up to some bad news last Monday. My dad called at around 7:15am and it was one of those calls that comes at such an odd time that you immediately know there is something wrong. Turns out my grandmother had passed away in the middle of the night. The past few years had been really rough – she was in a nursing home with severe dementia and did not seem to recognize the family anymore. She and I were so close when I was growing up. I spent several weeks each summer with her and my grandfather at their idyllic house in New Hampshire – picking raspberries (thats actually hard work), going on hikes with my grandmother and her friends searching for wildflowers and the ruins of old mills that our ancestors had built. We shared a lot of interests and I think we really understood each other. All of that was gone by now of course. Dementia had left her a shell of her former self. Unable to articulate anything resembling coherent thought it killed me a little on the inside every time we visited her in the nursing home. Given all of this I thought I wouldn’t be sad when the time finally came but I was wrong. I needed to get out so I headed to a familiar trout stream to mourn and to fish and try to clear my head.

It was around 60 degrees and sunny when I arrived at the stream, not bad for the middle of March. The bugs were popping and the fish were rising. Size 18 Blue Winged Olives were everywhere – in the air, on the banks, collecting in the eddies and the fish were happily slurping them all over the place. The only problem was that the area where I was fishing had all sorts of micro-currents making a drag-free drift difficult to sustain for more than a couple of feet. Adding to the difficulty, these were well-educated fish and wouldn’t hit anything attached to my 5x tippet. Of course I had just run out of 6x so the only option I had was 7x. As soon as I dropped down a tippet size, I started getting takes on anything resembling a BWO, provided the drift was ok. But now I was faced with another problem – I couldn’t land a fish on 7x! I guess I am a bit rusty from a long layoff due to work, winter and other factors. Every time I got a take, I’d excitedly set the hook and pop! fish and fly gone.

After 3 of these I gave up, realizing that for whatever reason it was just not my day for dries on fine tippet. So I switched to a euro-nymphing rig and started bringing them in. In about 15 minutes I brought to hand 4 wild browns. Each one put on an aerial display and strained to break me off but the 5x held. I managed 2 pictures that both suck. I forgot how impossible it is to take pictures of fish with your phone when you’re fishing alone. Eh, here they are anyway.

As I moved up stream I chatted with one guy, showed him a little about the euro techniques. After which he politely explained that he only fishes dries, but that he appreciated the demonstration nonetheless. He lamented the decline of the stream, the ineptitude of the stream-bank restoration work that had been done and the general (bad) direction that things were going. I told him I honestly didn’t see it . Of course his perspective goes back a lot longer than mine. But other than the fishing pressure the stream was getting, it seemed to me to be one of the better streams I’ve fished. It holds many wild browns some of which are very good size. I said it seemed to be in good shape to me but he said I should’ve seen it 20 years ago. I don’t know about you but I feel like most old timers tell me this. I am sure that in some cases it’s true but as I get older and I start to understand the effect of the “rose-colored glasses of hindsight.” We always want things to be like they were, it’s just part of human nature. We long for those moments that have long since passed. He longed for his trout streams of yore the same way I longed for those warm summer evenings sitting on the porch with my grandparents talking as we ate dinner as the setting sun turned everything a deep orange hue. We can never have it back, but we’ll carry those memories with us in our hearts, forming a part of who we are and how we see the world. For that we are truly fortunate.