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| Pretty redband bow. |
My wife and son had plans on Saturday to meet with some friends, so I had most of the day for an adventure, at least until dinner time when we had plans to eat in Conshy. The snow, followed a couple days later by a mild day, had me excited to try NEPA for my first native brookies of the year or maybe some Lehigh Valley wild browns? Then, about 8 PM on Friday night, I got a text from Eric: “You want to wet a line tomorrow?” Well, I let him talk me into staying closer to home because he had a much shorter window to fish today.
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| Zebra mitch... |
I ran through a list of streams that we could fish and landed on Ridley Creek in the Fly Fishing Only section since it was one of the few creeks within 30-45 minutes that I haven’t fished in recent months. Eric should be glad we did, as he definitely caught a couple more fish than me… mitch! He’d never fish the creek, so I was guiding for free, as often happens with my buddies and me. I do all the hard work, I tell you! I guess there are worse things than putting friends on fish and fishing the state park is hardly work, I suppose. In the end, we had a successful, leisurely, picturesque three hours with some nice rainbows to show for it. I will let Eric slide on this one (but not without of few mitches thrown in).
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| One of Eric's 6 or 7 on the zebra midge. |
As is often the case, the limited parking at Ridley was filling up by the time we arrived at 10:30 AM. We did manage a spot near the bridge, so we started at the pool where everyone starts, with predictable results: a couple tentative nibbles on the zebra midge by pressured October stockies. Eric explored up to the falls but found shallow water this time of year. When he came back down, I took him down to a couple holes downstream, and we each got on the board with nice sized rainbows. The measure net had both near 13 or 14 inches and fat. The ones that have been in there a while have a rich, dark color, many with the distinct redband like the one pictured at the top of the post and in the net.
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| A fat 13 incher |
The honey hole was a bit tight for two guys to fish, so we eventually moved downstream again. When I took a water temperature at a deep bend where I usually catch fish, the thermometer read 37 degrees in the sandy shallows. I was not surprised, then, that the fish I caught here barely registered movement on a small indicator. The best thing about catching a fish or two here was that I was on the bank with my cold feet out of the water! Eric is not a big fan of fishing those slow winter holding holes, and he had success in some faster pockets upstream, so I followed behind him as he returned to the honey hole.
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| The guide was allowed to catch a few too! |
Since it had warmed up, fish were responding better to the nymphs. We saw some midges rising, but with the snow melt, the creek was muddy, so fish must have been eating the emergers while still hunkered near the bottom. Once in a while, I could see the tell-tale flashing of white mouths of trout or the full body flash of suckers and chubs eating. By the time we quit before 1:30 PM, fish even hit the hare’s ear or pheasant tails in size 18 that we were using to get the 20 and 22 zebra midges down in the strike zone.
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| Winter fishing at its picturesque best. |
While we had the place to ourselves in the morning, by midday we were starting to see other anglers fishing and walking around, so we didn’t bother working further upstream towards the Subaru (Talk about guiding, I even drove!) and, instead, called it quits. Before we left, Eric let me sneak into the honey hole to try and close the gap in the fish tally, but by then I think he had tagged every fish in there, maybe even the ones we caught the first time through. It was a good day, catching close to a dozen between us, and I got home long before my wife and the boy, so I even got a short nap before going out to eat some high-end soul food. All the nearby special regulations creeks will be getting fish from the PFBC around the third week of this month, so more winter stockie fishing to come, at least until my spring break in March...
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| Picking pockets in the snow. |
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