Midday Pocket Picking

I had a couple hours of unexpected free time early this afternoon and made it over to my favorite local wild trout stream.

Even in the hottest part of the summer this small, shaded tailwater runs cold. While the other tailwaters here have warm water spilling over the dam after thunderstorms, this one never seems to spill. The releases and flows are remarkably consistent.

I rarely see anyone else on this stream, even when you’d be rubbing elbows with a dozen people on the other streams in the area.

Why do I so often get this stream to myself, even though it is clearly marked in the local fishing guides?

First, the trout here are small, wild fish. You’ll rarely catch anything larger than 8 inches, and when you do, it probably came up from the reservoir to spawn rather then being a permanent resident. I’ve read some old local guidebooks and it was apparently this way in the 70s and 80s, too.

Second, most of the stream is pocket water. There are four big pools on the steam, but most of it looks like this:

The great thing about this pocket water is that there is a small fish behind every rock. But they spook easily, and if you miss a take you probably won’t get a second one from the same fish. That’s okay, there’s plenty more here.

As Art Flick wrote in his essay How to Fish Pocket Water,

It has always been difficult for me to understand why so many trout fishermen spend most of their fishing time in pools or fairly smooth water and so little time working pocket water. Possibly-more likely, probably-they do not realize they are missing a good bet and some mighty interesting fishing.

A euro-nympher I ran into as I was arriving one day and he was leaving said, “I only come here when I can’t fish anywhere else because I kind of get tired of catching these small fish.”

Well, I don’t. I exclusively fish dry flies on this stream and love picking apart these pockets. It is hard to beat the thrill of reading the water, selecting a spot where you think a fish might be, carefully casting a dry fly, and being rewarded with a splashy take.

This one fell for a size 16 beetle. Terrestrials are often a good bet on this stream in mid-to-late summer.

Maybe one in every four times I fish this stream I might run into a kindred spirit who likes fishing pocket water for these small, wild fish, but even then it is never a concern. This stream runs two miles through the woods, without a road in sight.

Sweet solitude. Unheard of on a weekend on the other streams in this watershed.

This place has a lot to offer besides the fish, too. Life is abundant here. Frogs and toads, deer, mallards, herons, crayfish, coyote, owls, and macroinvertebrates. Trout lilies, ramps, and trilliums in the spring. Moss, ferns, fungi, and wildflowers in the summer.

Here’s a few that caught my eye today:

Today I found myself hoofing it back to the car as a thunderstorm rolled in. Despite the hurried dash, I made it back to the car feeling more calm and refreshed for having wiled away three hours rock hopping and casting dry flies to wild brown trout in cold pocket water.

I’ll take the solitude and small fish here to jockeying for a spot any day.