Rethinking poor water conditions

Posted by philip on June 21, 2009

We’ve gotten hammered with rain here in western PA over the last week and it’s put the stream flows throughout PA, MD and WV in the USGS water watch map terminology “very high”.  Today was father’s day and my wife asked what I wanted to do for father’s day, to which, of course, my answer was “go fly fishing of course”.  I was a little discouraged last night as I looked over the USGS water watch map and saw all the cyan, blue and black dots signaling that the water levels throughout the tri-state area were “un-fishable”.  I slept in this morning til 6 and poked around the house, tying flies and playing on the Internet until the girls woke up.  My wife asked why I decided against fishing and I had to explain that I thought the water was un-fishable.  At about 9 am, I couldn’t stand it anymore.  I had to at least go look at my local stream.  So I packed up my gear (because you can’t ever just “go look”) and headed down the road for the 30 minute drive to the DHALO area on my local stream.

As I rounded the bend to where the river is visible, my heart sunk a bit as the water looked like Yoohoo.  I told myself “maybe it’s clearer up river” and kept going.  I pulled in the lot at the project and noticed another vehicle there.  Could someone else be as crazy as me?  I figured they were just walking the trail that parallels the river and walked down to the stream to check it out.  The water in this section actually didn’t look too bad.  It was definetly off color and very high.  I could see the bottom in a few places where the water was shallow and about 1 foot deep.  I decided to give it a go.

I geared up and immediately thought to put on a streamer, which I did.  I put a muddler minnow on and tied about a 24″ section of tippet off the bend of the hook down to a flashback phesant tail (size 16) with a single “BB” shot above the muddler.  I walked up stream a good bit to start working my way down.  I should mention that I rarely fish streamers, and never really liked fishing them.  I remembered reading about a method in the current issue of Fly Fisherman magazine where a guy in Colorado has had great success fishing a streamer with a dropper and pounding deep pools fishing the rig in a dead drift style vs. a stripping style.

That’s how I progressed fishing for the rest of the day.  I fished the streamer up into the current just as if I was fishing a tandem rig with nymphs, except with no strike indicator.  Within a few casts I had a fish HAMMER the streamer and the fishing continued like that until 6 in the evening.  At around 4 a small caddis hatch came off and there were fish surfacing.  Normally, I would have thrown on a dry and fished for them, but I was having such a blast with my new found success with the streamer that I just kept fishing the streamer.

There really is something thrilling about having a decent 14″-15″ brown or bow just come up from no where and pound the hell out of a streamer.  The point of all of this is that when mother nature throws a curve ball and you think that the water isn’t going to be fish able because it’s 90% higher than it’s normal flow, don’t be discouraged.  I ended up having one of the best days on the water that I’ve ever had today (probably 50-60 fish to the net) just because I figured what the hell, I’ll try it.  I also left my comfort zone the the streamer, and I am hooked on it now.  I don’t know whether the colored water had anything to do with the aggressiveness that these fish had or whether I just forgot that trout usually crush streamers, but I really wasn’t expecting the show that these fish put on for the streamer.

Next time the water looks like it’s going to be unfishable, I’m going to get excited and pitch some streamers!