Caddis Chronicles

This past Friday afternoon my friend Paul and I headed up to Roscoe, NY to meet up with a few other friends and get in a few days fishing the Hendrickson hatch.   When we got to the Beaverkill River late in the afternoon the bugs had stopped hatching and the wind was kicking up.  The guys that got there earlier said the hatch was good but the fish weren't looking up.  With the wind blowing fairly hard and nothing on the water, we wound up hanging out at the truck with the others catching up and sipping a beer.  We never got geared up; the water surface was rippled from the wind and after an hour or so we didn't see a single bug or rise.  By the time we got dinner it was just getting dark and a wicked storm moved through with high winds blowing the rain sideways. 

Beaverkill cut stone culvert along the old railroad bed.

Saturday morning arrived with bright sun and cool temperatures. A few high clouds drifted by casting shadows that moved across the tops of the bare trees lining the hillsides along the river corridor. After a hearty breakfast, the 8 of us split up; a few guys took the drift boat to float the Delaware, two went to wade fish the West Branch of the Delaware; and Paul, Steve and I stayed on the Beaverkill hoping to hit the Hendrickson hatch that afternoon. 

As the day turned from morning to afternoon, the bright sun was muted by high thin clouds and the air warmed to comfortable temps.  Around 2:00 PM a few olives and blue quills hatched but the trout laid low, ignoring the surface and ignoring our subsurface efforts as well.  I did hook a nice rainbow on a baetis nymph, but after a brief tussle my tippet separated from the my leader setting the fish free except for the fly in its jaw and a thin wisp of monofilament that hopefully with come free in short order.

Around 2:30 or so the hendricksons and red quills started to hatch along with blue quills, dark grannoms and a few quill gordons.  By 3:00 there were quite a few flies on the water which brought a few trout up, but surprisingly most came up only once and then didn't show again.  This went on for a while so finding a target wasn't easy.  Then like someone flipped a switch just after 4:00, quite a few fish began rising steadily.  I picked out what appeared to be a nice brown that was taking hendricksons in a slick alongside a large submerged boulder and after a few casts got a good drift and the fish sipped in the hendrickson sparkle dun like it was one of the naturals.  The hook-jawed brown fought hard and didn't come to net without a few good runs that made my drag sing.
         

The hatch continued and the fish kept rising.  Over the 45 minutes I took another five browns on the same hendrickson sparkle dun that took the first one.  One of the fish was a little bigger than the first while the others were around 14 inches or so.  And then just as quickly as the feeding started it stopped just as suddenly a little before five o'clock.  The insect kept hatching, but the fish made other plans leaving us to scratch our heads wondering what just happened.  The weather didn't change, the river didn't appear to have changed, but something made the fish change their behavior despite plenty of food in and on the water.  We stayed on the water for another hour hoping things would turn back on, but that wasn't to be so we packed it in and got some dinner. 

Here's a hendrickson sparkle dun before and after the fish got done with it.       

There's nothing like a well-chewed fly.

Sharpen your hooks!