THE DAY TRIPPER FLY FISHING & FLY TYING BLOG

posted by Alex on Aug 12

This past weekend my son and I took our second annual trip to the Adirondacks. It’s a young tradition, but already, it’s probably one of my favorite trips of the year. There’s nothing better than spending quality time in the outdoors with him.

Although it wasn’t in the plans, we ended up staying at a campground due to a late start getting up to the High Peaks region on Friday. We arrived at camp just as the sun fell behind the horizon. If you saw us setting up camp, you’d think we have both been doing it for years. In the pitch black, we had our 16×10 tent set up, and a fire roaring in about 20 minutes. It was teamwork at it’s finest.

After eating hot dogs and smores, we hit the hay.

It rained hard that night, but we both slept like babies. Shortly after we woke up the fire was raging under six strips of bacon. We ate breakfast, packed our lunches and headed for the Cacscade Mountain/Porter Mountain Trailhead. Cascade is the 36th highest peak in the Adirondacks at 4098 feet, though the elevation change from the trailhead along the 2.4 miles to it’s peak is only about 2000 feet. About 2 miles into the hike, we had to climb about 40 feet of exposed rock.

As you climb the rock, you slowly come out of the woods when all of the sudden, the unfamiliar feeling of the sun and wind on your back tells you to turn around.

A point and shoot camera can’t capture the beauty we were looking at. You honestly can’t imagine a better view, but you know 360 degrees of knock-you-outta-your-socks is only a half mile ahead, or so.

You rock hop through the mud, through the pines, and all the sudden you can finally see what you’ve been sweating the past 2 and a half hours for- the summit. It’s all rock, and it’s completely exposed to the sky.

Your jaw can’t help itself, it just drops as you stand at the USGS marker, and slowly spin in circles, looking at the mountains, the clouds, those tiny little cars on the road, the ponds, and the streams.

It’s one of those places on this earth that you don’t want to walk away from.

We had lunch downwind of a large rock. There wasn’t much talking, the boy is only 7, and usually doesn’t shut up- but something in him knew it was time to soak in everything he could.

Not too far before you reach the summit, the trail forks. If you go to the right, it’s only about .7 miles to the peak of Porter Mountain. We decided, “what the hell, we’re already up here.”

I’ll share pics of that leg of the hike, as well as the way down, tomorrow(I still have more pics to upload)…

We drove back to camp and changed before heading to the water to get some fish for the fire. I decided to leave the fly rods at camp, and just help Coleman watch his bobber. So of course, the fish were going crazy for midges.

All he caught was a small chubsucker- damn worms. So it was hot dogs and baked potatoes for dinner.

The next morning we finished packing up camp about 5 milliseconds before the sky opened back up. Cole had the brilliant idea to drive towards the blue sky, and that’s what we did, hitting a few waterfalls along the way.

Tomorrow-

Porter Mountain, waterfalls, treefalls, and best of all- how I managed to get into my locked car while the keys were still in the ignition, without breaking anything….

posted by Alex on Jul 8

His eyes squinted as he looked at her, trying to decipher her body language. He was sure it was some kind of trick.

“Seriously, go fishing!” she repeated.

An evening without the kids doesn’t come around very often, and when it does, it usually meant they were going out together. But apparently not this time. The Mrs. decided that she was going to kick him out of the house while she put a dent in the long list of shows stored in the DVR.

He made one more attempt at getting her to come along.  It’s not that the attempt was insincere, but he had learned that women are always game to test a man’s allegiance.

“You sure you don’t want to come?”

“No! Go catch fish!”

20 minutes later, he was making his way across the flat.

It had been a few weeks since he’d fished this particular spot. The dam was only releasing water at about 850cfs. And much of the normally submerged flat was now exposed to the 80ºF air temps, the rest was blanketed by dried out weeds and algae that had experienced a bit of a growth spurt in his absence. As he walked across the jagged bedrock, he tried to remember a time when he’d seen the water lower- but couldn’t. A flock of geese eyeballed him as he stopped at the limits of his casting range from a large pool between the tails of two stretches of rapids. As he stripped line from his reel, a group of seagulls lost trust in him and flew to safety on a small boulder strewn island 100 yards upstream.

He smirked as the loop rolled over.  The nymph was enveloped by the seam. After a quick upstream mend, the end of the fly line stopped. Before the hook was even set, 18″ of slashing bronze surged into the air, then splashed into the the pool before darting for the faster water at it’s southern edge. There was a brief rooster tail as the fly line ripped through the rapids. The fish flew into the air again. Not only was it fighting the angler, it was fighting gravity.

“I knew I’d regret leaving the camera at home.” he thought as he admired the fish. It was the biggest he’d ever caught from this section of the river.

He picked up a couple more, but smaller, on his trek across the pocket water before reaching the other side of the river.

He bit the line just above the brown nymph, and stuck it back in his overflowing fly box, exchanging it for bullet-head hopper pattern. What had brought him the utmost satisfaction only several weeks earlier had become dull.

Thoughts about that pivotal moment were interrupted as he brought the mono through the hook eye, and counted the number of times he brought the tag end around the main leader.

“One, two three, four, five.”

Carp were at one time his holy grail. The challenge of catching a fish that relied almost exclusively on scent to feed, with a fly, was too good to pass up. He soaked in the glory of catching his first carp on the fly over the winter. But only two and a half months into the new season, catching them had almost become routine.

What really irritated him about the golden ghosts, was that after the hook was set, there was little chance of losing the fish. It bugged him to the point that he had very little passion to target them anymore.

He bit the off the tag end after tightening the knot and walked around a bend in the river towards the bay. It wasn’t really a bay, more like a long stretch of shoreline protected from the main current by a small peninsula. The river’s carp were fond of this protected stretch of water. At times there were literally hundreds of them enjoying it’s serenity.

He made a stealthy approach, and was shocked that he hadn’t seen any signs of fish before making it to the bay. It was a ghost flat. He guessed that the low water release from the dam was the culprit as he waded out to a central position to watch for feeding fish. A pair of lips rolled out of the water, followed by a dorsal fin and a big, golden tail at the edge of a large weed bed. Without thinking he double hauled the hopper, shooting it across the bay. It plopped down just inches from where the fish had just surfaced.

He’d never seen a carp feeding on the surface before, what were the odds that the first time he did, he had a dry on. It was as if it was meant to be. After watching the fly sit on the water’s surface for a while, he gave it a few twitches. Adrenaline roared as the fly got sucked under the surface!

It was quickly extinguished as the 9′ rod catapulted a 4″ smallmouth bass into the air.

There was little activity the rest of the evening before he called it a day. But his psyche was forever charred by the not-so-close, close encounter.

A new grail. A new quest. A new obsession.

Carp on a dry.