Late last week the mid-Atlantic was soaked by a large weather system that extended from New York, all the way to southern Virginia. On Friday afternoon I was looking at stream gauge after stream gauge on the USGS website and it was one spiked chart after another. By Friday evening, it was official, unless I wanted to drive 10 hours west to fish in central Kentucky on the Hatchery Creek; I wasn’t going to be fishing on Saturday. Accepting these realizations drove me crazy. Heaven forbid I take a Saturday and relax, tie flies, or do some reading. But this is April and April means hatching mayflies and trout. What made it worse was the realization that streams weren’t coming down overnight and Sunday was probably out too. On Saturday afternoon I shot Steve from Yellow Creek Trout Club a text and asked him how the water levels were out in Indiana, Pennsylvania. The picture he texted back surprised me. While the water levels were higher than normal, the watercolor was an amazing shade of green. That was the only convincing I needed, I was fly fishing Yellow Creek on Sunday.
Read moreKeystone Select Waters, White Clay Creek
The White Clay Creek has been on my list of eastern Pennsylvania waters to fish for almost a year. Specifically, the Middle Branch White Clay Creek held my attention, as it was one of the first streams in the state to receive the Keystone Select trout stocking designation. When I’d read about this, I was excited to go there and never made it. Finally this past Saturday I decided that rain or shine, I was going to fish the Middle Branch White Clay. On Friday night I did some brief Internet research on the water and it was a bit confusing at first. There are actually three branches of the White Clay Creek, the East, Middle, and West Branches, and they all eventually merge into the Main Stem as the creek flows into the state of Delaware. The Keystone Select portion of the White Clay lies within the Catch & Release Artificial Lures Only section, which starts at the Good Hope Road Bridge and meanders one and a half miles southeast to the confluence with the main stem.
Read moreIce Out And East Side Spring Steelhead
Every March I head to Erie, Pennsylvania with a group of fly fishing buddies (“the steelhead crew”) to chase spring run steelhead. We’ve been making the trip for five years now and each time we get better at understanding the tributaries, finding fish, and catching them. This past weekend was the 2017 spring trip. Last week flew by and before long I was packing my truck with gear and looking at online steelhead reports out of Erie. Jack York’s Twitter feed was saying the creeks would be ice locked until Saturday and every post that went up on the Fish Erie thread made the weekend sound less and less promising. At one point I was texting the steelhead crew and seeing if they wanted to postpone our trip. After thirty minutes of back and forth, my enthusiastic friend Matt said we should just go and see what we find. And after I thought about, I realized that almost every trip we’ve taken to Erie has involved some type of uncertainty with weather, fish numbers, or water levels. It was settled, we were going to Erie, ice or no ice.
Read moreFounding Fathers And Benner Spring Browns
Somehow winter has crept back into the picture and it is cold again. On Saturday I drove north to spend the morning pheasant hunting at Martz Game Farm with three close friends of mine. The four of us call ourselves the “Founding Fathers.” This phrase refers to four friends who started a fly fishing trip to Big Pine Creek each spring as a way to stay in touch after college and share our love of the outdoors. It’s hard to believe but this June will be the fourteenth year we’ve gone. It started with the four of us and has grown into a trip that at times has included as many as thirteen people. I credit two of the founding fathers; Mike Haines and Mike Mamrak as being two people who helped me grow as a fly fisherman when I was first learning the sport. The pheasant hunt in March gives the four of us an opportunity to plan for the spring fishing trip. This year after the pheasant hunt we drove to the Muncy Valley to stay the night in a new property and cabin that Mike Mamrak recently acquired.
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