Bows, Browns and Brooks. That pretty much sums up yesterdays trip. I headed up to lower central Pennsylvania early yesterday morning to fish a highly popular and pressured trib(spillway). The lake was drained recently which flooded in an obscene amount of suckers into the tributary. Along with that though did include some big trout that were probably club stocked at some point in the lake.
I ended up on the road around 6am to allow me to be there by 8. Upon arriving it was just as I expected, empty. That’s one of the main benefits I love about fishing on weekdays, zero people. At-least not during main trout season anyway.
After gearing up it and heading down to the water it wasn’t hard to not spot some fish. There were suckers everywhere and good numbers of trout mixed it. This was from the outflow all the way down to the mouth.
To that point it wasn’t hard getting into fish pretty quickly. Although the approach was everything. The water was low and gin clear. Walking up upon the bank spooked fish right way. If not the trout directly, the suckers, which then spooked the trout. There was probably a 10 to 1 sucker to trout ratio.
Although this stream is stocked, it also has some wild fish mixed in from where the swim up downstream. After an entire day fishing i stopped counting at around 20 some fish landed. Which probably around 10 or so lost or rolled.
Unfortunately the biggest fish of the day pulled a Harry Houdini out of my net as I got my rod stock in a branch that I was trying to deal with, so no photo. However you can see him in the video, probably a solid 21″ or so.
However all the prettiest fish were landed and posed for a nice photo. Starting with this marvelous white streamer eater.
Pretty brown #1
His prettier brother then decided to chomp down as well.
Butter belly brown
Most of the bigger browns took some form of meaty fly. The majority of the other fish were all caught tight lining nymph or junk fly patterns. Which brings us to these two magnificent brookies.
Nom Nom Nom
Then you have a plethora of brightly colored rainbows that came to hand.
This brown was thick! Look at that belly fat.
Chunker!
Then you have the malnourished kind. He really needed that nymph.
And lastly you’re left with the hunted, the ugly and suction lips.
All in all it was a great day. I didn’t get to fish all the water I wanted to, but there’s always another day. I plan to try to fish as often as possible and keep documenting my outings as I can. Prime time trout season is about to start, and earlier then normal. So expect a large flood of stockie slaying before we focus back on the wild trout explorations.