Here in Virginia, runs and branches are common. In New England brooks are widespread, and where I grew up (New Jersey) that’s what we tended to call small streams, too.
Well, it’s been a month since I fished here and it’s the first time I’ve tried it during the summer. When I got there I did not expect to find a mostly dry boulder strewn spillway with some scattered puddles of stream. How can fish survive a summer in something like that? But survive they do. I ran across a couple walking their dog and they said it looks that way every summer. I know I’ve caught some nice brook trout in this river on two occasions (both springtime) so they are in there somewhere. And I managed to find a few.
I parked on the side of the road at the bottom of the stream and hiked into the park. It’s tricky figuring out how to walk in without trespassing. Hikers are definitely not encouraged with all the no parking and towing warnings, and you have to walk by a couple houses right at the park entrance but it’s all legal. I always make an effort to be quiet and move quickly past residences in these spots, which is not uncommon throughout the lower reaches of Shenandoah National Park. If I were living there that’s what I would appreciate, so I try to operate that way and be unobtrusive and as invisible as possible.
Though I’ve never had the occasion to use it (and hope I never will), I carry a Sawyer Extractor snake bite kit in my backpack whenever I’m hiking around fishing for brook trout. I am told this works to extract some quantity of venom depending on where the bite is on your body. For example, on your hands or feet it is supposed to work better than if the bite is on your calf.
However, the effectiveness of the Sawyer Extractor is somewhat debatable, and apparently one of the kit’s proponents has backtracked in the past few years on his endorsement of the product. As with almost everything on the internet, it’s hard to know what the truth is. Nevertheless…
Whether you do or do not apply a quick suction to a venomous snake bite when you are in the backcountry, the most important thing is still to get to a hospital. The only sure way to treat such a wound is to get a shot of antivenin. A little extraction, if it actually works as advertised, may buy you a small window of time to hike out of the situation and get to a hospital.
Hi-Vis Coachman. Photo by Tim Bronson at 468photography.com.
Another good attractor pattern for brook trout from Phil Monahan and MidCurrent — the Hi-Vis Coachman. Almost every brookie I catch in small mountain streams is on a Royal Wulff. Sometimes I get crazy and use a Mr. Rapidan or increasingly some bastardized version of an Adams that I tie myself. If it looks buggy and the water is moving, throw something you can see easily because the fish are going to snag it if it’s drifting cleanly and you didn’t spook them.
This is a cool story about finding golden trout in Colorado from Orvis News. It’s not the puritanical native fish expedition, since golden trout are native to California and not Colorado, but the spirit of heading into the wild to search for uncertain populations of wild fish is similar to how I regard angling for brook trout on the east coast. This guy found a lode of golden trout. Good on him.
This gets me jazzed. I am really looking forward to pre-spawn brook trout fishing in the next couple months.
Summer is officially over, and that means the same for my long hiatus from work and this blog. You see, over the past couple months I took some time off. My travels brought me to some brook trout as well as some real big fish, and also to some incredibly tiny fish.
First, the brook trout. As usual, each summer I spend some time in the Poconos, a wooded expanse of hills and water in northeastern Pennsylvania. In only one of two trips I took to catch some brookies in the past two months I managed to catch ten fish in one afternoon on a small creek near the cabin we go to each summer. It was crazy. These fish were all in two pools that I always hit on this stream, and for some reason every one that I got to my hands slipped out. Camera shy I’m sure. Totally annoying and yet amazing fun all the same. This included what was the biggest brook trout I’ve ever had in my hands, easily over twelve inches and possibly larger. This was one of only a few times I’ve actually “battled” a brookie. On a three weight rod a lot of small fish are a minor fight but this was truly an effort. And as I grabbed my camera and brought this relative lunker into focus he thrashed right out of my hand and back into the water. Bummer. But what a fish.
The summer also included the usual fare on the lake we visit — pickerel. Almost any time of day, these guys attack almost anything. With the hot weather we had to go deep to get them, and though some days were a little slow they are always willing to assassinate a Clouser minnow or a slowly drawn lure.
Thirty inches of pike fury.
But the big trip of the summer for me was to Gananoque Lake in Ontario, Canada. A couple friends let me tag along on a trip they take every summer (one of them for the past thirty years) to catch some big bass and pike. I had never caught a pike until I hauled in this guy.
Sweet.
The big disappointment of this trip was being restricted to spin fishing only, except for several nice bluegills and a large crappie I caught off the dock of our cottage with my big old 9’6″ 8 wt Scott G series. When you’re on a boat with three other guys who don’t fly fish, the fly rod is not a popular idea. When I asked, the response was something like, “Sure you can fly fish. Get your own boat.” So it was the Ugly Stick with a 12″ wire leader and one super productive lure all day every day, the silver and blue Rattletrap. It was hot. Had to go deep.
Good smallmouth! Photo-challenged friend.
All that was great but the bass fishing on Gananoque Lake was the biggest surprise. These guys have never had huge success with smallmouth bass but three of us hooked some good sized bronze backs like the one pictured with yours truly. Certainly the biggest smallie I’ve ever landed, and by far the biggest fight of any fish I caught that week, big pike included. There is nothing — NOTHING — like catching a healthy smallmouth bass. That made the trip for me.
Other highlights of the summer included a stop on the St. Lawrence river for more pike and a trip to Round Valley Reservoir and the South Branch of the Raritan in New Jersey. My dad and I hit both of these on another very hot day in late July. Skunked we were, but I did see some nice rainbows in the reservoir and I know the South Branch has a great population of browns, rainbows and brookies. I will definitely be back there this fall and probably this winter too. Hopefully I will get to Round Valley again, too, and in a boat since the shoreline fishing is a little limiting in that place.
As for the incredibly small fish, that happened in late August on the North Fork of the Thornton River in Shenandoah National Park. I’ll come back to that. It’s impressive in its own way.
Hope you all had a great summer. Stay tuned for more…
Apparently, through a vulnerability on either the WordPress platform or in the theme used on this site, the Brook Trout Fishing Guide was hacked. Certain pages were redirecting to a nefarious site that attempted to download and install malware. This problem is now fixed and I apologize for anyone who may have been targeted. Insert long winded rant about malware and hackers here, your rant or mine, but the bottom line is this is part of life on the internet.
Fortunately, Google and the major browser vendors try to warn you if you attempt to hit a site that is a known distributor of malware, and many anti-virus packages for PCs hook into your browser to provide similar warnings. Hopefully you all run such software.
