"And all at once, summer collapsed into fall" - Oscar Wilde
It's funny how universal it is the way people find a certain ethereal beauty in the changing of the leaves. How we go for long drives and hikes in October, watching hillsides and forests turn from their summer greens and are soon set ablaze in fiery reds and oranges. How we all find beauty within the dying of chloroplasts; an allure in the cutting off of circulation within the organs of some of our planet's most important living things. Fall's a time of change, when everything here in the North-East starts bundling up in preparation for the hard winters.
Our streams and rivers here get what I like to call "the leaf hatch." When the leaves start falling, they start clogging up the water column in slower and deeper parts of the streams and rivers, making it far more difficult for resident trout to find your flies. You got to make a lot more drifts.
Approaching one of my local Central PA limestoners, I tied on a double nymph rig with a #14 Pheasant-tail going down to a #18 Prince, and started working the first riffle. Here, the water was fast enough that the leaf hatch wasn't an issue. All of a sudden, my bobber dips down, and I lift to nothing but slack. Wondering if that was a fish or bottom, I made a second drift in there and immediately get dropped. I lift and instantly feel several headshakes before the fish pops off. Onto the next riffle.
A few more on the way up, I manage to stick a fingerling wild rainbow on a Prince Nymph. Wild bows are unique in the North-East. Not many streams have populations of true wild fish, and previously, the only ones I've caught in the past have been on salmon eggs in the veins of the Finger Lakes. They're beautiful animals, with distinct mottled pink dots on a backdrop of green and silver.
I moved up the creek as the sun moved across the sky and as the wind picked up, the black walnuts began to fall everywhere, soft thuds echoing throughout the trees every few minutes. I managed to pick off a few several more small fish, mostly on the little Prince Nymph.
Arriving at one of the deepest spots in the stream, my attention was drawn to a few large suckers sitting on the bottom. I tried drifting the nymphs in front of them, but they paid little attention to anything I had to offer, so I put the bobber back on and began working my way up, picking up a few small browns on the Prince.
Spring Creek is no longer a stocked watershed, having established populations of wild browns and rainbows from original stockings many years ago. It's a great opportunity to fish somewhere you can guarantee that every single fish you swing your flies past is stream-born and stream-bred.
