The day before, I'd checked in with the Middlebury Mountaineer, and their main fly fishing guy told me that some of the waters I wanted to fish were at 70F already. Both of those spots were on Otter Creek, so that ruled out those waters for the day. Regretfully, the Otter is a tough spring river and I still haven't fished it this year. It is a big river (don't let the Creek in the name fool you), and it takes a while in the spring for water levels to drop low enough for safe wading. This year, about the time the wading was getting safe, the river got too warm for catch and release fishing. Most people who practice catch and release fishing for trout advocate never fishing water at or above 70F. I tend to cut things off at 68F, just to be a bit safer. I don't want to be responsible for the death of a fish in warmer waters.
So, with my plans changed, I first fished on the Middlebury River. Given its sources, the Midd stays cold a lot longer than some other rivers. I checked the water and it was 60.5F. The water was also low and the pocket water I was fishing was challenging. I opted for a stonefly as my lead fly (I tried golden and brown stones), and played around with various nymphs for my trailing fly. As careful as I was in and around the water, I did manage to spook a few trout, and I had no strikes.
Next, I stopped at the Middlebury Mountaineer to buy some flies and talk about fishing options. As I looked at some of the recommended flies, I realized my flies on the Midd had been way too big. I'd been fishing size 6 stones, with a size 12 dropper. I picked up five patterns at the store:
- Size 14 Yellow Sally stonefly (bead head)
- Size 14 Kyle's Yellow Sally (bead head, a bit more orange than the first fly)
- Size 16 Sloan emerger (Hendrickson nymph pattern, bead head)
- Size 18 Master Baetis (bead head)
- Size 18 JuJu Baetis
I can easily tie the latter three flies, and I will plan on adding them to my tying rotation.
The guide at the store recommended a couple places to fish, well south of Middlebury. I headed that way and immediately ran into two things when I arrived at the river - a dense cloud of mosquitoes and two high school boys fly fishing in the same area. I covered myself with bug spray and found a place to fish away from the boys. At one point, one of them decided to invade the area I was fishing, which made me rather unhappy. So, I took off upstream, driving to a new location.
I spent the next three hours fishing up a narrow gorge, fishing for allegedly big browns and brookies in small pockets of water between the drop-offs. This was some of the most challenging wading/hiking I've ever done for trout. At one point, I was thinking that I was working harder than if I'd gone to the gym instead of fishing. I had the water to myself, but I did not see a single fish, I didn't get a single strike, and I saw no bugs other than mosquitoes. I did find a very large black stonefly fly in a tree, so some other fisherman at some other time allegedly believed there were big fish in this river. I also saw very recent footprints low in the gorge, so someone else had fished there as recently as yesterday morning. But, after three physically intense hours, I hiked out of the gorge and returned to my car. I decided to head back to Middlebury and see if I could find some cool water on the New Haven. I pulled into a parking area about 15 minutes before sunset. I was surprised there were no other cars at this very popular fishing spot.
I hiked to the water and pulled out my thermometer - 66.5F - cool enough to fish. I started with an elk hair caddis and a juju baetis dropper. On my fourth cast, my elk hair caddis submerged unexpectedly and I set the hook, eventually landing a wild brown. A couple casts later, I missed a second fish. Both strikes had come on the baetis and there were no fish on the surface, so I decided to try to double my odds by fishing the baetis behind a yellow sally. This failed miserably, and 20 minutes later, I went back to the dry and dropper configuration. It was getting dark and a few fish were working the surface by now. I got a small wild rainbow on the baetis very quickly. I had other fish come after the dry fly, but they were either just playing or they were too small to even get it into their mouths. It was a size 14 and I assume they were small fish.
Finally, it was too dark to see my dry fly any more, so I called it a day. I had fished hard for 9 hours and I landed 2 trout. The first 8 hours produced no strikes at all. Despite arriving home at 10:30, sweaty, smelly from bug juice, and completely exhausted, it was a good day.
It's raining today, which might help our water temperatures a bit. But, we might soon be entering a period of limited stream fishing, except for high up in the mountains in small, well-shaded streams.
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