Last year I read some about Delaware, and wrote some. A couple of weeks ago I read some more, and wrote some more. I tried to imagine the place, and I mostly got it wrong. In my head I pictured grimy streets and run-down buildings full of sketchy situations, and I’m sure there’s some of that in parts of Wilmington. Where we were though was lovely.
We did make it as far as the center of Wilmington, but for the most part we were in the suburban buffer between Wilmington and Philadelphia. Suburban Wilmington is what mini-mansions aspire to. Graceful houses with some age, screened by trees, bordered by lawns, adorned in the spring with flowering everything. I think if somebody threw a beer can out their car window, in a couple of hours it would flower. It was clean, lush, established, and with just enough unmanicured space.
Terry Peach guides out of his shop, A Marblehead Flyfisher. When we planned this trip pre-Covid, Terry warned me that fishing near Wilmington was urban fishing. I get why Terry said that. Most of us imagine fly fishing in a mountain wilderness. This wasn’t wilderness, so Terry did his job: one expectation managed. For me though “urban” conjured scrambling down the slope of a half-eroded, half-concreted drainage ditch in a sketchy part of town to get a cast to a carp. What Terry told me was that we’d be fishing in an urban park, probably solely to knock notions of wilderness out of my head. All I heard though was urban. When I got to the Brandywine I was surprised that it was a nice park, a lovely park, the park of the morning of the world. Ok, it wasn’t really Eden, it wasn’t Yellowstone, but it was pretty. This wasn’t ditch water.
This park, Brandywine Park, runs along both sides of Brandywine Creek and is populated by joggers, people walking dogs and pushing strollers, rose gardens, anglers (all of whom seemed to know Terry), bank riparian zones, and safe parking. It’s location was apparently blessed by Frederick Law Olmstead, though that was probably before the nation’s eastern-most interstate, I-95, transected it on its way from Miami to the Canadian border. Where we fished, upstream of the interstate overpass, the park is a mix of natural and pampered green growth. If Delaware mangroves could survive the cold, they’d be pretty lush mangroves.
The Brandywine (which is the best name for a body of water ever, and which is also the name of the river in the Shire) flows out of Pennsylvania and into Wilmington where it meets the Christina River and then flows into Delaware Bay. The Christina in Wilmington is tidal, but we were too far upriver, about two miles I think, to be affected by the tides. Terry put us fewer than 10 feet off the right bank, just below the first dam, née the second dam. The former first dam was removed because it was in bad shape, and as a side-benefit the open water encouraged shad migration, and there’s plenty of discussion about removing more dams for the shad. The first dam, née the second dam, is part of the Wilmington freshwater supply system though, so it’s unlikely it will ever be removed. Kris asked why there wasn’t a fish ladder, or elevator, or some such. Terry said ladders were expensive, both to build and maintain, and the local government had other priorities. Shad don’t vote.
Water was apparently high, and not as clear as it might be with lower flows. To avoid backcasts–which because of bank growth would have caught a lot more trees than fish–we fished Terry’s Sage Z-Axis spey rods. They were shorter than some two-handed rods, 11-foot 7 weights. I’d last cast a spey rod more than a year ago in Washington State, and then only for a day. I broke my rod, but I didn’t mention that to Terry. I learned my lesson, to get the tip down to the water on the snap-T, and anyway some things are better off forgotten.
We fished skagit lines without a sink tip. Terry said some interesting things about lines, that different lines worked differently with different rods, and that some lines made some rods sing–of course you have to be able to cast worth a damn to make that true, and I doubt I’d know the difference. He said though that as a local fly shop owner it was his job to know which lines worked best with which rods.
American shad are mostly filter feeders, plankton is their favorite gamefish, and coming from the salt into freshwater to spawn they’re not eating anyway. They have one thing on their tiny fish brains–par-tee! It’s orgy time, and Terry said they would move fast upriver to spawn until something stopped them and they stacked. That’s where he said we wanted to fish, where they stacked, either to rest in front of an obstacle before their next run or because they couldn’t go any further. Our job was to set up and let the fish come to us. There were natural obstacles that would work, slots where the river changed levels for instance, but we set up below the dam because that was the biggest obstacle of all. The dam stops fish.
There are plenty of theories about why filter-feeding American shad take a fly; anger, curiosity, raging hormones, maybe even that shad don’t just filter feed and they’re taking small fish out of habit. Terry said that because they don’t have fingers, the only way a shad can swat an annoyance is to use its mouth. It sees something in its face, and it’s like swatting a mosquito, but look Ma, no hands!
Because shad aren’t really feeding, the flies don’t really match anything. Shad fishing is extreme attractor fishing; maybe distractor fishing would be more accurate. The flies are various heavyweights of bright stuff. A combination of hot pink and chartreuse isn’t a typical selection of fly colors, even in salt water. The shad flies are meant to hang in the water column in fast water and provoke a response, not to imitate.
We were on river right, so to cast we used a double spey cast over our left downriver shoulder. The casts were across, sometimes even a bit upriver, and at specific targets. They weren’t long, I was at most 10 feet into the running line, which may have been because that’s about as far into the running line as I could cast. Watching Kris, it looked like she was casting much better than me, though I am proud that I didn’t break any rods. She wasn’t shooting any line (I could shoot a magnificent five or six feet), but her loops were tight and consistent. Terry did a great job coaching both of us.
Terry had us cast, mend, try to follow a current line as far as we could, and then let the fly swing. Then wait. Then wait. Then wait some more. The dangle, he called it. Terry said that was where shad most often hit the fly, when it was unnaturally dangling in the current. I told him he ought to come up with a song for people to sing to hold the dangle as long as he wanted. I tried singing “Happy Birthday” because it was all I could really think of, but I got sick of it. Next time I think I’ll memorize the lyrics to “Cool Water” by the Sons of the Pioneers, or maybe Al Green’s “Take Me to the River.” There has to be something better than “Happy Birthday,” and singing Al Green is always worthwhile.
Because there will be a next time. One of us didn’t catch a fish. The problem wasn’t us, not completely us anyway, and Kris caught what Terry called a fall fish, which in Delaware is anything that’s not a gamefish. It was some kind of chub. Kris doesn’t have to go back to Delaware, but I do, and I suspect she’ll come along. We really didn’t spend nearly enough time there.
The big problem in the Brandywine was that the water was too cold and the shad weren’t there. It was cold when we got to Delaware, and it never really warmed. Terry said we’d picked the perfect time of year, but that it was freakishly cold, that the water temperature needed to be above 60 or the shad would run back into deeper water in the Christina. I’m afraid we all need to get used to saying that: I didn’t catch a fish because the weather was freakishly [cold][hot][dry][wet][windy][whatever]. It’s our new global warming paradigm for not catching fish.
It’s also the problem with allowing one day to catch a fish. We’re already burdened with less than stellar skills, we’re fishing in unfamiliar places, and sometimes it’s just not going to happen. That’s ok. I’d like to see more of Delaware.
