Category: Mid-Atlantic

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Pennsylvania Packing List

Gear

We took waders, boots with studs, and wading staffs, and we used them. Kris fished with her 10’6″ Orvis H3 3 weight that Trout Unlimited sent her for her intelligence, beauty, and patience. I fished a 9-foot Winston Pure 5 weight that I got from Trout Unlimited because they felt sorry for me.

On the third day, trying to tight-line nymph with a medium-length leader and only a foot or so of fly line out of the rod tip, I couldn’t control the short casts of the leader. Some of it was unfamiliarity, but whatever it was, my casts were mostly big looping air balls with minds of their own.

Dom recommended that I pick up the line earlier, before the leader passed me on it’s way downstream. With the increased line tension I could get a better back-cast, and that helped, but I’ve wondered since if one of the longer, lighter rods used for Euro-nymphing–like the Orvis rod Kris was using– wouldn’t have made those casts easier? That if an advantage of the long, light rods is that the greater leverage and limber tip section make short casts of light lines easier? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll be curious enough to try it and reach a conclusion, or maybe not.

We fished Dom’s flies and Dom’s leaders, or Jim’s flies using pretty standard trout leaders. I don’t think we fished anything smaller than a 5x tippet, which is good since anything lighter than 5x tippet has to be manufactured by captive fairies in Celtic sweatshops. It must have been ok. We caught some fish.

Penns Creek

Other than being a pretty great place to fish, Penns Creek holds an oddly significant place in American history. In 1755, a group of Lenape massacred 14 Irish and German settlers on Penns Creek, and took another 11 captive. While William Penn lived, the Lenape and Penn’s Quaker-controlled government had good relations–maybe the longest-lasting good relations between Europeans and Native Americans in the British colonies–but after his death the English pushed the Lenape out of their historic territory into territory controlled by the Iroquois, and then the Iroquois joined the pushing. The Lenape struck back at Penns Creek.

The Penns Creak Massacre kicked off the Western Pennsylvania colonist/Indian conflicts of the French and Indian War, and as a direct result of the massacre, Pennsylvania assemblyman Benjamin Franklin led the effort to fund a common defense. Military funding was something that the Quaker-controlled Assembly had previously refused to do, and still because of their religious convictions didn’t want to do. Franklin won. In response, the remaining Quaker assemblymen resigned from government. It represented the end of Pennsylvania Quaker dominance, a broader divorce of religion and government, and a spasm of self-governance that arguably spurred Franklin toward the Revolution. That’s a pretty heavy load for a little crick.

Moccasins, Probably Lenape, history unknown, purchased 1908, National Museum of the American Indian.

The colonist/Indian conflicts in Western Pennsylvania were particularly violent. The Indians, encouraged by the French, fought a bloody no-holds-barred war against settler families. The English, encouraged by the English, offered bounties of $150 for Lenape men’s scalps and $130 for women’s. In the end, after the French surrendered, the Lenape were pushed out of Pennsylvania further into Ohio. Ultimately the largest groups of the Lenape–now known as the Delaware–settled in Oklahoma, with tribal governments in Bartlesville and Anadarko.

Irony of ironies, when I was 10 I shook Roy Rogers’ hand in Anadarko.

Knife sheath, possibly Lenape, 1780-1820, National Museum of the American Indian

Gettysburg

The Battle of Gettysburg, together with the concurrent fall of Vicksburg, Mississippi, was the end of the Confederacy, even if they wouldn’t admit it for another two years. Gettysburg was Lee’s greatest military blunder, other than rebelling in the first place. We called too late to get Segway tours of the battlefield, which sounded pretty fun, but we did find a horse-drawn wagon tour, which was probably better since it was too cold and windy to go zipping around on Segways. There were about twelve of us huddled in the wagon, not counting the horses, and it was a wee bit awkward being the only Southerners. I’m not sure that it helped that I was the only person who could answer the Guide’s question about which president besides Lincoln was born in Kentucky? It was Jefferson Davis, who hardly seems to count as a president, but I knew the answer so I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

Because we were going to Gettysburg, I was reading Ty Seidule’s Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause. Along with the rest of his army career, General Seidule is the former head of the West Point history department. He rightly touts his Southern, military, and historical bona fides. I don’t have any military bona fides, and barely any historical, but I certainly have Southern: five of my great-great grandfathers fought in the War, four for the Confederacy, one for the Union, but even the Yankee was a Southerner, having migrated from Eastern Tennessee to Missouri. During Gettysburg all of my great-greats would have been somewhere in the West, not Gettysburg, but still, notwithstanding family ties, it’s Gettysburg that captures attention. There’s a lot more romance in Pickett’s Charge than in siege starvation at Vicksburg.

I suspect that many of us white Southern boys of a certain age are reckoning with our Confederate legacy. It’s hard to tell four of your ancestors that morally they sucked, even if the conversation is only in your own head. My great-greats were mostly privates, but I don’t really doubt that they knew they were fighting for the preservation of slavery. They may have made treasonous choices for indefensible reasons, but like as not they weren’t unaware of the reasons the War was fought.

I suspect too that General Seidule’s book has a limited audience–old Southern white guys with a moral conundrum; their early reverence for the South smacking up against their delayed realization that the Confederacy doesn’t deserve reverence–but it’s an audience who will be comforted by General Seidule’s authority and certainty and urgency. I appreciated it anyway.

As an odd aside, I re-read the Gettysburg Address before we went to the battlefield. In Pennsylvania it finally registered that Lincoln was only memorializing the Union dead. Only the Union dead were buried in the new national cemetery. The Southern dead were left on the field and then buried in mass graves, and Lincoln’s words didn’t extend so far. It was a startling realization, that unlike what came after the end of Reconstruction the memorialization of the War didn’t always include the South, and that Lincoln’s consecration said nothing ennobling about the Southern dead. That’s tough stuff for a Southern boy.

Philadelphia to Pittsburgh

It is further than 70 miles from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia. Who knew?

In Philadelphia we ate. Yeah, yeah, we saw the Museum of Art, and the Barnes Foundation collection, we walked around the preserved Colonial part of town and looked at the Liberty Bell through a window. It was all fabulous, but mostly we ate. Then we ate some more. Then we ate.

Of course I consulted my friend Tom, font of all trustworthy food suggestions. “Tom,” I asked, “Pittsburgh? Philadelphia?”

Tom didn’t know anything about Pittsburgh. About Philadelphia he was certain:

DO go to Zahav, Michael Solmonov’s paean to Israeli/Middle Eastern food. Great food. Great service. Great cocktails. And contrary to everything I say, it’s ok to order the set menu here – for two. Lots of appetizers, salads, entrees, and dessert.

Getting a reservation to Zahav is a bit like going fly fishing. It takes preparation, memory, some luck, and a credit card. Still, it’s worth it. It is an unflinching barrage of food, fabulous food, the kind of food that wears you down and leaves you drained and unhappy that you can’t eat it all, and thrilled that you ate what you ate.

There is also the Reading Terminal Market, where we ate roast beef and roast pork sandwiches at Tommy DiNic’s, then went back the next day to eat Philly cheese steaks at Carmen’s. Since it’s the only Philly cheese steak I’ve had, I can attest that it is, as far as I know, the best in Philadelphia.

We failed to get the Amish donuts at Reading Terminal Market on Saturday because I didn’t know the owners were Amish and I didn’t want to stand in line, and then they were closed on Sunday. It’s a lot of God to ask us to give up donuts for the Sabbath, so instead of the Amish donuts we went to Federal Donuts and Fried Chicken. I’m sure the fried chicken is excellent, but I really regretted missing my chance at the Amish donuts. Our daughter says they’re outstanding.

There was a very good market in Lancaster, the Central Market, which had lots of Amish goods but I recall no donuts. After visiting the Lancaster Market we ate lots of pickles. It’s a great place to buy pickles, plus after Philadelphia we needed some kind of a purge.

As for Pittsburgh, there were vendor stalls all over the Strip District, but as a market it was not so good as Reading Terminal Market, and while Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art is very fine, it’s not so good as the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I screwed up and we didn’t see the Pirates at PNC Park, which is unforgivable because the park is beautiful and I like the Pirates. The Pirates are far more likable than the Phillies.

The Pittsburgh airport is remarkably inconvenient. It’s hard to figure out where near the airport to stay, and Uber rides from downtown to the airport are ridiculously expensive. We did eat the famous local sandwich at Primanti Brothers, which for some reason is stuffed with French fries, and on Saturday night ate at a good Italian place, Picolo Forno.

The French-fry stuffed sandwich is not so good as the Philly cheese steak.

George Catlin, Ambush for Flamingoes, c. 1856-57, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Feathered Hook

We stayed at some good places, and a lousy airport Holiday Inn Express in Pittsburgh–it was advertised as an airport motel but it was seven miles from the airport and its airport shuttle was shut down for Covid–but best of all we stayed at the Feathered Hook in Coburn, which is a fly shop on Penns Creek with an attached bed and breakfast. This is not a romantic bed and breakfast decorated with period gew-gaws and serving artisanal breakfasts. This is a place for anglers to sleep when they fish Penns Creek. It’s decorated with fly fishing gew-gaws and second-hand furniture that might be antique someday but more likely will be discarded as junk, and there is a bit of a college frat house vibe about the place, that is if the college frats were 60-year-old fly fishermen. Kris was the only woman there, so if it is considered a romantic getaway it’s romance for a decidedly niche clientele.

Breakfast at the Feathered Hook is bacon and sausage and eggs and toast; three eggs, however you want them (though probably not poached, and certainly without any hollandaise). I guess that could be considered artisanal among the same niche that goes to The Feathered Hook for romance.

Coburn itself consists of The Feathered Hook, a main street with a few dozen raggedy clapboard houses, a bridge over Penns Creek, some vacation homes, and four Trump 2024 signs. The fly shop at The Feathered Hook is very good, and they have a fine selection of handmade bamboo fly rods. I have no reason to own a handmade bamboo rod; there’s no fishing I commonly do where I could enjoy a handmade bamboo fly rod, and they’re expensive–even for fly rods–so of course I’ve long wanted one. They’re pretty. If The Feathered Hook had put prices on the rods, I probably would have bought one, but I didn’t want to ask because then I would have been committed and Kris would have been aghast. I would probably find as many uses for an English riding saddle.

I’ve long wanted an English riding saddle.

We stayed at the Feathered Hook two nights, and the first night we drank whiskey in the kitchen with the Antietam Fly Anglers of Maryland. There was a very funny story about one of the members, a doctor, who had organized a trip to Argentina, and then a couple of days before the trip he collapsed and had to have immediate heart surgery. His friends, some of whom were at the kitchen table–as I recall it is a fine formica and chrome table that perfectly matches the decor, but memory is tricky and it may have been deal–went on to Argentina to fish for golden dorado without him. Ok, that’s actually not a very funny story. Maybe it was a funnier story because of the whiskey.

Anyway, the next day the members of the Antietam Fly Anglers were gone and were replaced by members of Long Island Trout Unlimited. They were good to drink whiskey with too, and I think that maybe Kris told them the heart bypass story, though in her version I bought a handmade bamboo rod for an extravagant outlay before I collapsed after she brained me. I can’t remember if in her version she went fishing for golden dorado without me.

Playlist

The Pennsylvania playlist was particularly fine, especially the jazz. Art Blakey, Keith Jarrett, Melody Gardot, Stanley Clarke, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Billy Eckstine, Joe Venuti, Joe Pass, and Stan Getz are all from Pennsylvania. Three of the great jazz pianists, Errol Garner, Billy Strayhorn, and Ahmad Jamal, all attended Westinghouse High School in Pittsburgh. I could listen to that music forever.

I hadn’t listened to Jim Croce in years, or Todd Rundgren or Labelle or the O’Jays, and I’m a fan of them all. Henry Mancini grew up in Pennsylvania and was the composer of the soundtracks to the movies of my childhood, and you know what? It’s terrible music, almost unlistenable. The two best songs, Peter Gunn and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, just can’t do enough to make me forget the Theme from Hatari! or Love Story or Dear Heart. If Mancini had been all we had to listen to, I couldn’t have left Pennsylvania fast enough.

Did I mention that Joe Pass was from Pennsylvania? And also Joe Pass?

Hans Bernhard, Joe Pass and Ella Fitzgerald, 1974, licensed under Creative Commons attribution.

Taylor Swift is from Pennsylvania, and Pink and Christina Aguilera and Joan Jett and Ethel Waters. Chubby Checker, Frankie Avalon. Fabian, and the Stylistics are from Pennsylvania. There’s also a pretty good classical orchestra in Philadelphia, and the Curtis Institute, and lots of new young bands. It is, all in all, a pretty great state for driving around listening to music.

Here’s a recording of the Guarneri Quartet with Emmanuel Axe playing the single best piano quintet ever written about trout, and brown trout specifically. All but one of the Guarneri Quartet studied at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute.

Guitar

I took the Kohno, and played a good bit, though I don’t remember playing anything in particular; some Bach, some Villa-Lobos, some Sanz. I almost certainly worked some on a guitar transcription of Pavane for a Dead Princess. I always work some on a guitar transcription of Pavane for a Dead Princess, and never remember any of it beyond the first couple of pages. Too bad there are five pages. Ravel, by the way, was not from Pennsylvania, but I bet he would have liked it.

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Spring Creek and Penns Creek, Pennsylvania, May 13-14, 2021.

After our day of fishing on Spring Creek at Fishermen’s Paradise, we fished two more days near State College with Dom Swentosky guiding; one day on a different part of Spring Creek, and then a day on Penns Creek. For the uninitiated, (1) these are Cricks not Creeks, and (2) Dom Swentosky is a good writer, he plays the guitar, and his sons play little league baseball. I guess as much as anything, those are the reasons we hired him.

A lot of Dom’s writing is the kind of detailed technical nuts and bolts stuff that warms fly fishers’ hearts: after reading one of Dom’s blog posts, I swapped out my elastic wader belt–the kind that sags–with a police utility belt that doesn’t sag. I’ve never regretted it, at least not after I figured out how the safety catch worked and could stop wiggling. Dom also has a blog post on how while wearing waders to stay warm, dry, and pee. It’s not a post that will speak to Kris, but for 50% of the population it’s useful, particularly if you already know about the safety catch. 

Dom wade fishes in trout streams. It’s everyone’s mental image of fly fishing; romantic, peaceful, aesthetically pleasing. It may also be the least guided fishing in these late days, what with the rise of drift boats and saltwater angling, and it’s certainly the kind of fishing I do least. Wading in a warmwater bayou just doesn’t have quite the appeal, plus one is likely to lose boots in the muck. It doesn’t matter whether I ever get to do it though. Wading in a trout stream is what fly fishing looks like. 

Wading in a trout stream with Dom is also a barrage of information. He had something useful to tell us about everything happening on the stream–as Dom would say, another data point–and the info was compressed into a constant stream of well-honed nutshells. I thought about making a list of the best stuff Dom said, but then I figured I’d probably forgotten most of it, or worse had garbled most of it.  I suspect that it’s all in Troutbitten anyway, and Dom says he learned to fish from books by Joe Humphreys and George Daniel, so among the three I wouldn’t be telling anybody anything new. When we got home I started re-reading Daniel’s Dynamic Nymphing, and came across this at the very beginning of the chapter on tight-lining:

The style is . . . physically demanding. You must be able to get close enough to present the patterns in a natural manner without opposing currents creating drag. As a result, a straight up-and-across approach is common to ensure that the line and leader end up in current flowing at the same speed. In large bodies of water, this means having to wade further out to cast directly upstream . . . .

George Daniel, Dynamic Nymphing, p. 48.

I suppose I had read that heartwarming passage before, but to me it only had meaning after I stood in the crick with Dom and he explained that to avoid dragging the fly, I should try to cast straight up from the rod tip and not cross currents. When I first read that passage in Daniel at home, it apparently didn’t register. Standing in a trout stream it made sense. 

There are a lot of possible streams near State College, and at the end of our first day Dom named some choices and asked us where we wanted to fish? The first day with Dom we had fished Spring Creek again, just a bit upriver from where we fished with Jim, and I was tempted to fish Spring Creek the third day, to adopt it as my short-term home water. We had seen Penns Creek though, and it was beautiful. It seemed a shame not to fish it. We chose, but I oddly hadn’t wanted the burden of choices. I don’t know why choosing was harder than it should have been.

I got a little obsessed with why it was hard to choose, which led to why do I fish with guides anyway? Which led to why do I fish? These are big existential questions, and I came up with and discarded dozens of answers. No single answer was completely satisfactory. Since I didn’t list what Dom told me, here’s a list of some of the best reasons, replete with bullet-points:

  • I like water. Think of songs about water, La Mer for instance, or Down by the Riverside or Shenandoah or Take Me to the River. There must be thousands. Everybody likes water. We need water.
  • I like to hold fish, if only for a second. At that moment of connection everything is centered.
  • Traveling with a fly rod is a good excuse. Why did we go to Pennsylvania? We went to Pennsylvania to fish. We could have gone to Pennsylvania to see the Liberty Bell, or to eat scrapple, or to watch the Pittsburgh Pirates. We went to fish.
  • I like the technical stuff. I don’t pretend I’m much good at it, but I enjoy the mechanical focus that fly-fishing demands.
  • It’s something my parents gave me, though I’m no longer baifishing for catfish. Still, I’ve always fished.
  • It’s something Kris likes. She likes golf, and she likes crochet, but I’m not going to play golf or take up crochet. Among the things we share, we share fishing.

Like I said, these were big questions, and of all the answers, the one I came back to most often was sitting bankside for lunch with Kris and Dom while we watched a sulphur mayfly hatch come off the water. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of mayflies, and they were lovely, delicate things, pale yellow and tiny. They drifted off the water like the gentlest act of creation. I napped a bit–I may not be so accomplished of a fly fisher, but I will brag on my streamside napping–and when I woke we still sat and watched the mayflies for a long, long time. There was anticipation, trout feed on rising mayflies and we expected at any moment to see the rings on the water where the fish were starting to rise, but they never rose. It didn’t matter. There was satisfaction in the moment, joy even. It was just enough of everything.

* * *

Before we left State College, we stopped by Flyfisher’s Paradise. There was a tray of sulphur flies on the counter, and the guy tying flies behind the counter joked that it was good to know when he came to work what he was going to do all day –tie sulphurs. For a couple of weeks he would tie sulphur after sulphur after sulphur. We bought some to bring home with us, a couple of spinners, a couple of emergers, and a couple of duns, not that we’re ever likely to use them. It doesn’t matter. Now I have them.

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Spring Creek, State College, Pennsylvania, May 12, 2021.

Some Egocentric Background

I’m a pretty mediocre fly fisher. There are other things I do well, complex things, enviable things, useful things. I am, I think, a good husband, a good father, and a good lawyer. I’m curious, and reasonably quick on the uptake. If you wanted to elect someone as Benevolent Overlord, I’d be an excellent candidate.

Me, demonstrating one of my higher level fishing skills. I demonstrated similar prowess in Pennsylvania.

Still, my knowledge of trout fishing is weak. I know trout live in rivers (and also lakes), I know they eat bugs (and also fish and freshwater mollusks), and I know that when I catch one it’s more often than not pure happenstance. I’m a greedy man though, and more than most things I want to know how to fish for trout. Fifty years later all those wasted adolescent hours studying Field and Stream have left me ambitious.

Parts of Pennsylvania, along with a few other American places–the Catskills and Yellowstone come to mind–are trout fishing holy ground. Fly fishing lore is loaded with Pennsylvania names; Vince Marinaro, Charlie Fox, and Ed Shenk at Letort Spring Run, Bob Clouser on the Susquehanna, and, at State College, Bob Harvey, Joe Humphries, and most recently George Daniel. I suspect there are several reasons Pennsylvania’s such fertile ground: a lot of great streams spread across the state, an outdoors recreation tradition, just enough leisure and money, and–and this is peculiarly my own invention–a manufacturing industry that encouraged Pennsylvanians to think in a peculiar way. It’s probably nonsense, but I like to think there’s a tie between Pennsylvanian’s aptness with the mechanics of fly fishing and their aptness with the mechanics of industry.

Philadelphia to State College and the Crick

I rarely get messages on this blog, and except for one article*, I’m pretty convinced that nobody ever reads it but Kris and a cadre of hackers from Mainland China. That’s ok, I write it for Kris, and as for the hackers I’m glad for the attention. Last year though Jim Litrum left a message on the blog. He asked if I’d been at Joan Wulf’s school the previous June, and I thought that sounded about right. He volunteers at the schools and said he remembered me. I didn’t think I disrupted class that much.

Jim said that when we came to Pennsylvania, we should go to State College and he’d introduce us to some people. State College, population circa 42,000, is nigh on the state’s center. It’s the home of Penn State**. We were planning, then Covid shut everything down. 

As part of our 2020 planning I had booked Dom Swentosky as a guide for two days in May near State College. I admired Dom’s writing, and he coached little league so if nothing else we could talk about baseball. When Kris and I re-planned for May 2021, we had one spare day and Jim said we should fish Spring Creek, State College. 

Actually he said Spring Crick. Did you know Pennsylvanians say Crick, not Creek? Apparently in the Mid-Atlantic (including Pennsylvania) and the South (except for Texas), proper pronunciation is crick. Of all Southerners, only us Texans stubbornly say creek, with a long e. We also say buy-you, not buy-yo, so what the hell do we know? We got that wrong too. You can’t rhyme “Goodby Joe/Me gotta go” with buy-you, not even right here in Buy-you City. 

So on Jim’s advice we went to State College a day earlier than we had originally planned. We had dinner with Jim, and it was a great dinner, in a good place, and Jim, who I’d only talked to on the phone, is a pretty funny guy, particularly after a martini. Plus I tricked him into agreeing to buy breakfast the next morning. Hah!

The Mayor of Spring Creek.

Jim grew up in Pennsylvania, went to the Merchant Marine Academy and then the Navy, and after the navy spent a career in the chemical industry. He retired to State College to fish (after a stint in the Keys), then for family moved two hours southwest, still in Pennsylvania. On Wednesday we had breakfast with Jim and his friend Chris at the Waffle Shop. Jim paid. Hah! 

We followed Chris to Fisherman’s Paradise on Spring Creek. I kid-you-not. Pennsylvanians had the nerve to name the place Fisherman’s Paradise and put it right there on the map.

Jim’s friend Chris is a former army colonel who retired to State College to . . . fish. This is a recurring theme here. Retired. Fish. And Chris fishes. Chris fishes every day, or almost every day. He spends 300+ days a year on the water, mostly on Spring Creek. Jim called him the Mayor of Spring Creek. When we fished with Dom he said that Chris was the best dry fly fisher that Dom knew. Dom said that on those 300+ days that Chris fishes Spring Creek, he always fishes dry flies, and that he catches fish on a dry every month of the year. He said that some months Chris was fishing midges so tiny . . . Well, I can’t come up with a metaphor for so tiny. Really tiny, teensy, too small to see on the water, too small to count most days as more than a smudge, and on Pennsylvania February days when everybody and everything sane (including bugs and fish) are home in front of the heating vent, Chris is fishing Spring Creek, in shorts, watching where his smudge might be–Chris can’t possibly see his fly–watching for the suggestion of a rising fish, and catching fish. That’s crazy. That’s good.

Of course this is all hearsay and imagination, and will remain so. I’m not going fishing in Pennsylvania in February to see if it’s true.

Spring Creek might not be considered much of a place to be mayor of, it’s neither very wide nor very deep, but if you’re mayor of a trout population, it’s a large constituency. According to Jim, where we fished Spring Creek holds about 4000 wild brown trout per river mile. That’s a lot, and the best parts of the Creek are never stocked. There are no rainbows, no brookies (though certainly there once were), just wild brown trout. The trout can run larger than 20 inches, but most we saw–ok, ok, the one that through random dumb luck and Jim’s good advice I actually caught–was probably about 10 inches. I suspect that’s pretty common. 

The river is spring fed,*** so flows are reasonably constant, both as to volume and temperature. Jim explained it to me. Beneath us and the topsoil was limestone. Limestone is permeable. Water filters down into the limestone, cools, and leaches mineral deposits. As new water seeps in, old water is pushed up and out. First-in, first-out. My finance lawyer brain can understand that. Spring Creek’s springs are the products of FIFO accounting. 

The Spring Creek limestone was formed from invertebrate deposits settling from ancient seas that eons ago covered Central Pennsylvania.**** When the spring water emerges from the limestone, it brings along the leached minerals from the ancient dead things, and the mineral nutrients that once fed the ancient dead things can now do double duty, this time feeding new invertebrates that feed the mayflies and caddises that feed the brown trout. Lots of brown trout. The world’s motherload of brown trout. And Jim and the Mayor and their friends are there to fish those brown trout. 300+ days a year, including February. 

Jim and the Mayor and Friends

With Jim’s guidance I caught my trout early. Kris fished with the Mayor and caught one a bit later. I guess it goes without saying that we were fishing dries. Jim and the Mayor fish dries. These days nymph fishing is all the rage among trout anglers, and most of the best new writing about trout fishing is about the unexpected complexities of nymph fishing, but watching a bobber hesitate can’t compare with watching a fish rise. The Mayor and Jim fish dries.

And we met the guys. I don’t know what Jim told people, or maybe everybody just shows up at Spring Creek every day, but it seemed that morning everybody started showing up. There was the retired Penn State biology professor, Art the retired Penn State engineering professor, and Luke from the local fly shop, Angler’s Paradise. I apologize that I can’t remember names, or everyone. There was Dan Shields, who literally wrote the book about Spring Creek, and Dan gave me a copy.***** We had to fish in front of these people. These people actually know how to fish.

It was the sulphur mayfly season, so Jim (who’d offered whatever flies I needed, which was helpful since Chris pronounced my 40-years of randomly accumulated dry flies worthless for the sulfur hatch), tied a size 16 sulpher on my line. I fished that all day. I was casting ok, and my drifts were mostly ok, but I probably missed a half-dozen rises. Jim gently–ok maybe not so gently–pointed out that my hook sets were horrible because my line management was horrible, that I left my left hand, my line hand, off the line too often, that I left too much slack line on the water, and that by the time I cleared the enormous line slack the striking fish had sent a couple of texts, called in a dinner reservation, and readjusted the car radio to find the ballgame. Sulfer duns were coming off the water, so the mayflies were cooperating, and I was getting rises. My biggest problem was that the trout didn’t have the courtesy to hook themselves, and apparently I was too polite to do it for them. 

Towards the end of the day I was fishing up river from the bridge with Jim and Art, and I watched Art catch fish. His casts were all just a foot or five finer than mine, his drifts were just a bit-to-a-whole-lot cleaner, his hook sets were, well, he set the hook. Mid-afternoon Kris and I left the creek to check into our room, and then Kris had us back at Fisherman’s Paradise for the evening’s spinner fall. In the roughly three hours we were gone Jim caught and named most of the fish in the Creek. That part anyway.

What These Guys Got

Jim said that he and Chris would fish until dark because the best fishing of the day would be the spinner fall–after mayflies emerge from the stream as duns, their lives consist mostly of partying, laying eggs, and falling dead back to the water as spinners. I didn’t fish much that evening, for some reason I couldn’t see my fly and for some reason I didn’t trust my fly or my fishing, so I just watched. Kris was having a fine old time, but I was oddly unsettled. Our companions were so knowledgeable, so practiced, so accustomed to their water, and while I was happy just to watch them, I was also a bit jealous. Ok, more than a bit.

One of the downsides to our gallivanting around to fish is that it’s a great way to travel, but a lousy way to fish. I have learned a lot about visiting places, but not so much about catching fish. These guys stayed put in a place worth staying put and had learned how to fish.

I sat down a night or so later and read parts of Dan Shields Fly Fishing Pennsylvania’s Spring Creek, and I’ve read it off and on since. Dan covers the year at Spring Creek, nymphs and dries, and he covers the miles of the river. There are parts of it that unfortunately I’ll never need:

Fall brings some decent hatches of Trichotera, Tan Caddis in #16-18 and a larger fly in #14 produce interesting fishing.

I say unfortunate because I doubt I’ll be back to Spring Creek in the fall. My loss.

There are also things Dan writes that could be said for most bodies of water:

Improve stormwater detention basins. They should trap, filter, and permit water to seep into the ground instead of pollute streams.

Of course in Houston we need detention basins to keep from drowning, which selfishly encourages detention more than any aversion to our considerable non-point source pollution, but that judgment could be written for any urban area near a body of water.

Entertainment isn’t Dan’s goal either, though at times he’s flat-out amusing, at least in a fly-fishing sort of way:

Spring Creek trout see more different imitations than I do, and I work in a fly shop.

But Dan’s not really writing to amuse. Where Dan shines brightest is in his description of the place, its geological and human history, its biology and ecological fragility, its provenance, if you will. Dan is thorough, careful, and writing from his obvious affection and knowledge. You may from time to time get some information out of me, but I assure you, it’s purely accidental and completely unintended. Dan on the other hand knows Spring Creek, and he willingly shares the considerable stuff he knows. It’s not casual knowledge, either, he’s worked for it. It’s a small book, but it’s a glimpse of love for a place worth loving.

No wonder I envied these guys.

Postscript

Before we left, at the end of the evening when we were losing the light, while I was moping about feeling wistful and debating with myself whether I had ever actually seen a spinner, or knew what one was, Kris caught one last trout. Sometimes I envy my fishing partner too.

* For some reason, I have one blog post that gets hits almost every day. It’s about Pyramid Lake ladders, and was published April 1, 2019, which should tell you everything you need to know. I feel sorry for the poor people who stumble across that post looking for information.

**I’m guessing that’s where State College got its name.

***I’m guessing that’s where Spring Creek got its name.

****This may qualify as the worst sentence I’ve ever written, and since I’m a lawyer it’s got considerable competition. I thought about rewriting it, but it was so marvelously bad, I had to let it be. It reads like I stole it from the introductory paragraph to Chapter 4 of your 8th grade earth science textbook.

*****Daniel L. Shields, Fly Fishing Pennsylvania’s Spring Creek, DLS Enterprises, P.O. Box 41, Lemont, Pa 16851. Dan’s book is self-published in the best way, by taking it to a local printer.

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Brandywine Creek, Delaware, May 10, 2021.

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.

Google Earth

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.