April 15, 2017 – Another Lackluster but Enjoyable Opening Day in NEPA – Monroe County

Wardman in beautiful, mostly fishless surroundings

My two oldest fishing partners are my dad Joe and my buddy Ward, and they are neck and neck.  I think Ward and Joe’s old archery buddy Chris were the first to get my dad and I hooked.  Ward and I went our separate ways for years at different times in our lives and took different paths in some ways, but we have always stayed friends.  It helps that we grew up across the street from each other, and our parents still live on the same street.  We have been friends since we were 8 years old, nearly 40 years, so it’s more like family, really, and time apart does not really change the dynamic much.  We spent a good time of our early thirties sharing a beach house on LBI and fishing off his 28 foot Hydrasport, while looking for love in all the wrong places (like Joe Pops?) but eventually finding, later in our thirties, love, marriage, kids, etc, pretty much all at once.  We will be (or already are) old dads together, which many of our generation are anyway.  Late bloomers.  We should have been chasing skirts instead of biking all over SEPA hunting fish and stalking rabbits and pheasants with BB guns and wrist-rockets (many poor squirrels are buried in shallow, unmarked graves behind our parents’ homes, I must admit) but we eventually caught up and finally became adults, I guess.

Trout were caught, but not many, which has happened quite a bit on Opening Day over the last few years.

Ward doesn’t fish much anymore since he coaches his girls’ teams and golfs with his old man and has a busy work life, but we still get out a couple times a year, usually.  Opening Day of trout is one tradition.  We failed miserable last year with our kids in tow because neither of us knows how to fish for trout in a lake!  I also jump on a fluke or striped bass charter with him once in a while too.  This year, my dad got up at 4 AM and fell back asleep, but Ward and I kept the tradition alive and headed to the mighty Brodhead near Stroudsburg.  In one of my former lives, I basically failed out of ESU while drinking, working at ski resorts, chasing women, getting a broken heart or two (breaking at least one), hanging out with other beautiful losers, collecting way too much recorded music through a Columbia House postal scheme, and, yes, fishing.  My minor blue-lining obsession began when I was 19 or 20 and finally got a car to drive around the Poconos instead of hitching a ride to class.  I even took girlfriends into SGLs to chase brook trout, like that was going to impress them!  There were no fewer posted signs back then, but I had less to lose if I got caught.  I even had buddies who were shot over and had tires slashed, who stole rafts and canoes from resorts and night-portaged to the Water Gap…  Long story short, the Brodhead was in my backyard and became one of my home waters, long before I learned about Henryville Specials and the rest of the history of fly fishing in PA that centered on the once-fabled Brodhead Creek. 

I still proudly consider it one of my home waters, for good reason!

Ward and I fished the mighty Brodhead hard for many hours today, and we only had 5 or 6 fish to show for it, unfortunately all mine too.  Where is the justice?  The guy who fishes 3 or 4 days a week catches fish and the guy who fishes 3 or 4 times a year on a good year gets a goose egg?  Even though the water was in great shape, it was still too cold for the fish to chase Rapalas and spinners reliably.  The fish I caught hit the hardbait on the swing.  I even caught a couple just holding the plug in a deep swirling eddy.  One took a bugger on a slip bobber rig (I missed a couple others this way, wishing I had my 10 foot 4 weight and not a 7 foot ultralight).  It was a sluggish bite, sure, but also a good day out with an old friend.  

A nice surprise or two in a heavily stocked and pressured stretch.

The highlight for me, besides spending a day with Wardman and eating at a friggin’ Arby’s, of all places, was scaring up a couple acrobatic fish in some fast runs.  One that came off and one that I photographed above looked to be wild browns.  If not, the PFBC is stocking experimental parr marked beauties these days.  Crowds all over, loads of Jersey license plates belonging to tailgaiting TU-ers, I guess, and I landed a wild brown in a tough, directionless eddy of a hole.  Small pleasures!  I wish Ward had caught a couple, but he is good company and fishes just as hard as he used to back in the day.  The first 4 hours of the morning were meant to be a warm up on a tougher section, and it ended up being a mile and a half hike with no water and maybe a Cliff Bar and some jerky between us, so some things don’t change.  We may have been sore on Easter Sunday, and tired, but we can still do it when we need to do it.  Not bad for a couple of late blooming old dads.  Late forties with kids in elementary school?  I still don’t know if we did it right or wrong, but I am glad we are doing it together, at least when we get the time…

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