October's For the Trout, Year Two

 

"...a little like October in a sense... in love with itself"  - Michael Palmer

    Fall's the great ephemeral American time for gratitude, a time of reflection and change. It's also probably the most overhyped season of the year for wild brown trout fishing. Every single fly shop in the area is posting videos about the epic BWO and October caddis hatches, the sick streamer bite going on. Back home, the striper bite is heating up along the beaches of the Jersey shore. Everything's in a rush come autumn. 

    Native brookies: some of the most incredible species we have in the East. They're resilient yet delicate fish that have survived in little cold, clean, pockets of mountain streams all throughout Appalachia. I've been trying to emulate them lately, attempting to be quiet, colorful, quick, and utterly intolerant of conditions where I can't be my best. 

    Fall is spawning time for brook trout, when the males turn their seasonally festive pumpkin orange and begin fighting for spawning habitat. In my opinion if you're wading for brookies, you're not in the right places. However, if you somehow have boots in the water in a brook trout stream, keep an eye peeled for their circular spawning redds, and just watch your step. I approach mountain stream brook trout different than I do with browns. Brown trout fishing for me is all about chucking big meat flies, attempting to get the biggest fish in the hole to kill something. When I'm on a brookie stream you can jump across, the goalpost shifts from catching the biggest fish or even the most fish. I just want the prettiest one. 

    On this morning so crisp you could reach out and snap the air in half, I managed to catch a few colored up ones on a Parachute Adams. I never throw anything but single dry flies for brookies, and never will fish anything else. Free-stone mountain streams are small and unforgiving enough that there is no need to fish slow and technical. Fish living in them can't afford to pass up any opportunities. Maybe that's another admirable quality of a brook trout. 

    After spending a few hours up in the mountains, I followed the path of rain down to a larger, winding creek at the valley basement, where the brookie stream was demoted to tributary status and the hickory tussock moths were scurrying around the groves of shagbark and bitternut. I moved a few browns and ended up landing three on a small articulated Peanut Envy. 

    For the entire fall, Central Pennsylvania has been cursed with below average stream levels. I prefer to approach trout fishing in my local rivers like a river fisherman instead of a trout fisherman. What are the flows like? Where's the structure where big fish like to hide? How do I present a fly best to trigger a fish to kill it? These questions will catch you better fish than learning the scientific taxa of aquatic macroinvertebrates. However, this approach hasn't been super helpful recently when there's barely a piss-trickle of water in many of our streams. Spring Creek has been about as low as I've ever seen it, and you can walk through pretty much all of Spruce without getting wet above the belt. 

    Here's the thing though: catching fish is pretty much all just a combination of location and timing. My favorite timing, especially in low water? Go at night when all the smart anglers who don't avoid personal responsibilities are tending to such matters. The night fishing recently has been great, stripping mouse flies and skating muddlers for audible brown trout. 

    Last night, I spent the evening beneath a bridge at Penn's Creek whilst the sun slowly danced down across the valley. One fish was moved during the daylight on a streamer. As soon as it got dark, I threw a muddler cross-current and heard a big swipe break the surface right behind it. Continued stripping and I soon came tight with an 18 inch night-time brown trout, my new personal best. I had just released that fish and made a cast upstream, half paying attention as my muddler swung past me in the current, when suddenly I hear a deep gurgle and a loud smack, one that moved more water than any other night-time hit I've ever had. I raise my rod to nothing there. Just a single giant October ghost. One that I'll keep searching for. 

Aurora

 "I never saw magic crazy as this, never saw moons, knew the meaning of the sea." 

- Nick Drake, Northern Sky

I've yet to drink my fill on annual astrological events. The solar eclipse here in Central Pennsylvania was about as ephemeral as they come, with a four second glimpse through a window of cloudless sky in a sea of gray being my only sighting. The northern lights made an appearance back home in May, and I spent some time looking for them while out striper fishing, but a slight drizzling rain had persisted all night. Yet this October night was crisp and cold and clear enough for the aurora's second coming to shine on through bigger and better. 

    I didn't even know they would make a showing along the East Coast until my roommate informed me of such a thing right before sundown. Any other personal responsibilities for the night were soon demoted to the shadows of afterthoughts, and I raced off for the Penn State Arboretum. 

    Upon arrival at sundown, pink striations were already lighting up the sky. I laid down in an empty grassy field and looked up. People always forget to look up. How horribly incompetent our species is at contemplating vastness! Perhaps that is why we ogle so profoundly at major changes in the sky, that we're just so unused to the macrocosm, the idea that our world is so much bigger than us.

    My loner facade soon began to crumble, however, as my friend Matt and his brother soon joined us, and I then linked up with my friends Ethan and Mar, and we watched the striations pulse along and away across the Big Dipper and beyond. 

    At first, they were mostly pinks and purples, which slowly gave way to muted blues and grays and finally greens, life-green bands that lit up the sky every which direction, full of magic. 

The pictures taken in this article were captured by much better photographers than me, most specifically my friends Ethan Feldman and Mar Escarcena 

Sumac Lemonade

 

    Sumac lemonade tastes as sun-baked as the waning of September, as sour as the first apples.  The rains have washed away most of the flavor, seeping it down the fuzzy branches and into the silty dark soil below. However, enough still remains as long as memories of August, and enough is enough for sumac lemonade. My little sister Lauren and I dashed out of the car on a sunny morning on Goat Mountain, stumbling into a sumac tree with its spiraled bright red crowns playing queen of the forest. Most were out of reach, but Lauren managed to knock down a few crowns with a stick and the ones we tasted, while they felt like eating lemondrops off of a carpet, still were nice and tart. We knocked down and harvested about 4-5, sorted the brown seeds out, and left the red ones to seep into a bowl of water like the rain washing down the sumac of summer right into the topsoil and forever. Sweetened up the next morning with a bit of honey and it turned out wonderfully tart, a welcome drink to sip on and think of October to come. 

Big Meat Flies

     "The serious fly-fisherman's knowledge of these fish draws heavily on science, especially the easygoing, slightly bemused, English-style naturalism of the last century, but it periodically leaves the bare facts behind to take long voyages into anthropomorphism and sheer poetry." 

    - John Gierach (1/21/1946-10/3/2024). Rest in piece to one of the greatest writers to pick up a fly rod. Trout Bum is such an important book in my life. Thank you John Gierach, and I hope you're off catching brookies in that big celestial forever. 

    At this point in the trip, I was soaked to the bone. Central Pennsylvania has been covered by a rain for over a week straight, remnants of the hurricanes wreaking havoc to our South. We were more fortunate than our brothers and sisters on the other side of the Mason Dixon line though, and the Appalachians managed to dissipate most of the storms before it crash landed here. Instead of bouncing even further north, they lingered, heavily and steadily like a gray blanket. 

    I'm being a heathen, throwing a big black articulated meat-fly, force-feeding trout instead of nymphing or dry fly fishing. Hatch chasers can wax philosophical about the impurities and barbarisms of streamer fishing all they want, but that split second when a brown trout evolves from insectivore to piscivorous from the sight of a streamer swimming by will quicken the heart faster than a cup of good strong black coffee. 

    My first real foray into articulated streamer fishing began with a small rainbow that appeared from an undercut bank, jacking my fly and essentially hooking itself. A beautiful and deadly flash of silver and green that ignored all common sense, let himself be overtaken by impulse. 

    I pushed further up the creek, elevated by the rain and a sense of excitement for what lay ahead. Every raindrop every time my streamer hit an undercut bank and I slowly stripped it in, I watched behind for followers. I also found some autumn olives, a delightful ephemeral October treat. 

    Autumn is supposed to be streamer season, when big browns lose all sense of self preservation and decide it's time to start killing shit before the spawn and the chills of winter. My experience with seasonal river fish is slightly different. Even though fall can bring rains and overcast skies, after a long hot summer water levels are still typically much lower, especially compared to the snowmelt of spring. Still, you can run into some banner days fishing big baits in the fall.  

    After breaking my way across the whistling riffles I made my way to a piece of flat-water surrounded by willows on both sides. A half-hearted cast underneath one led to the biggest rainbow trout I've ever hooked coming out and crushing the streamer. I stripped most of the line in, but as soon as I pulled out the net she ran the fly-line back onto the reel and forced me to put on more pressure. Still, I had 12lb tippet on and it wasn't much of a fight. 

    Measuring at around 23 inches, this fish was a proper Spruce Creek specimen. Was it wild? Maybe. Did it also possible wander downstream from the private trout clubs where they're hand-fed pellets all day? Also a high possibility. Still, I caught it on public water a long ways-away enough from the private clubs that I was pretty happy with that fish and send her on her merry way to hopefully go sip midges and mayflies instead of dogfood. 

    

Hurricane Relief

 

    The recent floods in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene have devastated our brothers and sisters in Southern Appalachia. The human toll is already astronomical and will only increase as floods recede and searchers move in. Please donate if you can to volunteer organizations that are doing saint's work in this time of need:

https://www.bpr.org/bpr-news/2024-09-28/list-ways-to-donate-and-help-flood-victims-in-western-north-carolina-after-hurricane-helene

God bless all of the brave volunteers and first responders helping save lives in the aftermath, and my heart goes out to anyone that lost property or loved ones during this terrible event. Lots of love.