Fishin' with Squatch: Returning to first loves

Memorial Day weekend is always a weekend where I go back to my "first loves", the local streams that turned me onto small stream fishing. It's always a balancing act for me. It's a family weekend, so while the tendency is to take 3 full days and go fishing from sun-up to sun-down, a man's gotta be a good man and be with his wife and children. That, in and of itself, is better than fishing. This blog, however, is not a blog on family life, but on fishing life, so I have no guilt about putting aside my family affairs and writing solely about the fishing.

Saturday afternoon was cold and windy. I debated all day if I wanted to go fishing. I stayed in all day, cleaning the house, playing with the girls, but during their nap time I couldn't take it any more. I decided that despite the high winds and the dramatically cooler temps, I would go out for a little bit. I headed to Walnut Run in Lancaster County. Walnut was the very first small stream I ever fly fished in Lancaster Co. It's a tributary to Hammer Creek and took a big blow in the back to back floods of 2010. The fish are finally starting to come back though, and fishing has been solid this year.

I never caught a brownie in Walnut before, but we knew they were there because on my first trip there, my friend Brian caught a wild tiger trout. Saturday, I finally cracked the brown code.

Generally, I don't like to see wild browns moving into native brook trout streams, but this was within the first few hundred yards of the stream entering into Hammer, and out of half a dozen trips up this stream this year, this is the only brownie I found in the stream.

I still find that I spook a lot of fish on this stream. The lower half is very flat, the banks are overgrown, so it's difficult to avoid wading. Whether I'm catching the fish or spooking them, its encouraging to me to see fish in this stream.

Yesterday I decided to hit Hammer Creek itself. This, in my opinion, is the best stream in Lancaster County. It has great hatches, lots of native brookies and wild brownies, a few stocked bows, it's spring fed so it's fishable year 'round, the only thing it lacks is structure. The stream could benefit from a little stream bank restoration and special regs like catch and release fly fishing only, but it's Lancaster County's most popular approved trout water, so the state is happy to pump trout into it in the spring, let the slobs have at it, and then ignore the stream the rest of the year. Apparently our local "cold water conservation" group is just as happy to let things go the way they are as well. Fortunately, despite the neglect and the ever-widening banks (which I suspect the state likes because it keeps the surface water area larger-since they deem a stream's rating based on surface water to biomass of fish. If the surface water is larger it keeps the stream rating lower. If they would have to classify it as Class A, they'd have to stop stocking it.), the fish continue to thrive.

The first hole I fished, I saw something hanging from the trees. I thought, "someone must have been fishing up here because there's a green weenie hanging from that tree!" I found this odd since the stretch I was fishing is a stretch that most people never fish. As I got closer, I realized it was actually a green inch worm hanging down from a thread of silk! I saw these inch worms hanging down on just about every tree, and the brookies were taking advantage of this situation!

There was also a strong march brown hatch and a sulphur hatch going on. My original fly (a peacock caddis) wasn't doing much. I switched to a royal wulff and picked up a few, but still, I wasn't getting the results I wanted. I switched to a yellow sally (the biggest yellow fly I had-the sulphers were definitely bigger than I had in my box!) and that did the trick. The trout couldn't stay off the thing, and they were nailing it hard.

The stretch I fished took about 2 hours to fish from bottom to top, and I picked up close to 20 trout in that stretch. A great evening on the stream, and a perfect end to the Memorial Day weekend!

PS-my camera is cheap and will not focus on micro-mode. Suck.

Most of the brookies I caught were in this range