Just like fishing in a snowstorm

I have many fishy things to report, beginning Saturday, Aug. 1, when I accompanied Mike O’Neil to Woodchuck Lodge in Roxbury, N.Y., where he talked about naturalist John Burroughs (who used the small house and is buried nearby) and fishing.

The raconteur had to wing it; his computer went kerflooey, forcing him to work from actual handwritten notes.

Which seemed appropriate in the context of Woodchuck Lodge, where a rocking chair is covered with a heavy gray serge that was originally a suit Burroughs didn’t like, and despite being up in the mountains you can’t get a cell phone signal because cell towers are not allowed in the Catskill Park.

Armed with directions from angling legend Ed Van Put, we arrived in Roxbury early and were able to scout out a couple of small streams Burroughs mentions in his writing. They looked pretty low and squirrelly, not surprising in midsummer, and one spot was aggressively posted — with yellow tape, warnings of video surveillance and threats of armed patrols.

Uh-huh.

When Burroughs was operating, it was standard procedure to kill pretty much every fish caught. O’Neil said Burroughs refers to catching and killing dozens of trout at a time.

It’s a long way from that mentality to today, when it’s even money that keeping a trout or two for the table will get the hairy eyeball from someone.

Back in Connecticut, my cousin, Collin, asked if we could resume the fly-fishing lessons from a few years back. He just finished his first year at Colorado College, where kids are as likely to have waders and fly rods in their closets as lacrosse sticks and bongs.

We caught the tail end of the white fly hatch on the Housatonic. His casting got better as the evening went on, but his luck held: He didn’t catch anything.

I, on the other hand, put on a clinic — one of those rare moments when reality agrees with hype. I stopped counting the number of smallies that came to the net, as well as a decent rainbow and a better than decent brown trout.

Normally at this time of year, the water temperature in the Housatonic is in the 70s, which is horrible for trout.

They hunker down and wait for September, and the prudent and responsible angler targets smallmouth or pike and leaves the trout alone.

But the white fly hatch is an exception. For about 10 days to two weeks, usually at the end of July and beginning of August, this bug, Ephoron leukon, starts to show up in the evening.

When the hatch is at its peak, it’s like fishing in a snowstorm.

And everything with fins comes out to eat the things.

It’s Bizarro World for anglers. None of the usual rules apply.

Fly-fishermen tend to use a big dry fly like a white Wulff and a white spinner on a dropper for this hatch.

When I did catch a trout, I informed my cousin, I started counting once the fish was netted. If I had not removed the fly from the fish’s mouth in 15 seconds, I cut the leader and got the fish back in the water, as deep as I could manage, until it swam off under its own steam.

This was because the trout, already stressed by warm water and lack of oxygen, will probably not survive a standard fight with a fisherman.

All my flies have the barbs smashed down, to make removal easy, but even then they can be difficult to remove quickly.

So Collin watched as I quickly netted and returned a rainbow and a brown trout, both of which swam off under their own power and were in the net well under my 15-second limit.

If you fish the Housatonic from now until fall, the best thing to do is target the smallmouth with crayfish imitations, Wooly Buggers and surface poppers. The trout are hunkered down and are unlikely to move for these items, especially during daylight hours.

Wading the river when it is low is also a chance to really look hard at its geography and remember where holes or runs or obstructions are for when the water comes back up in the fall, and trout fishing is once again the primary focus.