Spring Creek 8/26

 

    It's the first day back at class, of a bustling, synchronized, collectivist chimera that I thought a few months in the summer sun would have totally cooked out of my brain. 

    I'm currently sitting on a concrete block whose purpose has long since been forgotten to time. I'm soaked from head to toe. I got my yo-zuri pins minnow stuck in a tree and foolishly thought that I would have been able to climb over and retrieve it, with all my belongings still hanging around in my pocket. Instead of triumphantly emerging with jerkbait in hand out of the silky dogwood, I instead ate shit, slipped, and landed in about 5-6 feet of water, one of the biggest drop-offs in all of Spring Creek, I suspect. It's amazing how clumsiness leads to desperation. I'll swim almost as gracefully as a semi-wounded dolphin but the second I splat into 5 feet of cold limestone stream when I least expect it, suddenly I'm head-down and floundering desperately to breathe. 

    I drug myself out onto a soft patch of moss beneath the dogwoods and left all my stuff on a nearby rock to dry, before putting down my notebook, sitting on a old structure, and beginning to chronicle my mishap for the world to read. 

    Earlier that day, as soon as I left my Geography and Human Populations class in a ball of sweat and dog-tired, I hopped in the Buick and drove down to a place that's near and dear to the hearts of every crusty old Central PA fly-fisherman: Fisherman's Paradise, Spring Creek. 

    Spring Creek's a mid-sized limestone stream that's a giant in the fly fishing world. The creek houses Fisherman's Paradise, a few miles of stream through the canyon that was set up as a fly-fishing, C&R only area, one of the first in the continental United States. I don't particularly care for fly-fishing only regs, preferring the money and time to be spent protecting and preserving clean water and clean air over kicking out kids for fishing with the wrong type of line. Luckily, Spring's about as clean and protected as they come in this country ruled by fat old greasy swines who like nothing more than leveling forest and clogging streams to make room for shopping centers and gold courses. Spring's water runs green, green as the spicebush and walnut trees that grow around it in the river valley. Green like life. 

    I arrived at Fisherman's Paradise in the heat of the afternoon, rigged my fly rod with a nymphing set up, and trudged upstream through goldenrod and black-eyed susans and found a section I could wade in to begin working my way upstream. 

   

    After about two hours and several break-offs with little sign of life, I decided to turn back. I looked everywhere for the golden flashes of brown trout rising to bugs, or at least coming up to take a swipe at my flies. Nothing. Maybe I hit a bad day. Maybe Spring Creek's reputation as one of the most pressured streams in the State is real. Maybe I just suck at fly fishing. A picked and chosen combination of all three, perhaps. Still, I was happy to spend an afternoon in a beautiful, albeit overmaintained location. 

    I drove through the valley downstream, with the caps and fog covered ridges on both sides off in the distance, reaching a different, less pressured section of creek where I was allowed to fish a spinning rod. 

    I began throwing a yo-zuri pins minnow, casting behind boulders and picking off browns behind almost every one. Most managed to jump and shake the barbless hooks I had on, but I brought enough to net nonetheless. A few miracle rises happened around sunset; brown trout gulping air and fall and grasshoppers, which is when I managed to pull my biggest fish of the day, a properly colored and osprey scarred brownie. I made an upstream cast right afterwards, and my line shuddered to a stop earlier than expected. Shit. I thought, looking at my lure hanging from the dogwood. Eh, I can probably reach it.