After a stretch of very rainy weather and work that precluded fishing, I was able to beat it for the Catskills for a couple of days.

I wasn’t expecting much, and was pleasantly surprised to find fishable water.

On Wednesday, after a circuitous voyage through the wilds of Greene County, made more so by the invention of internet directions, I turned up at the Batavia Kill impoundment in what is described as the quaint hamlet of Maplecrest, within Windham. Maplecrest is a wide spot in the road, and it’s not that wide, either.

Some of these Catskill burgs make our Northwest Corner towns seem like bustling metropolises. Or is that metropoli?

The Batavia Kill sidles into the pond after winding through some fairly flat, meadowy country. The angler walks out on a grassy spit between the pond proper and the intake.

The name of the game was a long rod and longer leader, and any sort of smallish dry fly as long as it was yellow.

It’s been a while since I tossed a 50-foot cast and peered after it, trying to see my little yellow speck.

I caught a couple of medium-sized browns this way, then switched to a hopper and nailed one right off.

This pleased Gary, my host, as he was tired of peering after specks and welcomed the chance to peer at something bigger.

We proceeded upstream and tried a couple of spots with no result. Then Gary had to go do some stuff involving legal documents, so I traveled further into the interior to a trailhead parking lot, which is the headwaters of the Batavia Kill and has feisty little brook trout.

I spent a happy 90 minutes or so in there with a Tenkara rod and a size 10 Parachute Adams. The water was cold at 62 degrees, and it was a relief to get out of the sun.

Thursday Gary and I headed to the Beaverkill downstream from the covered bridge campground.

We were hipped to this by Thos., my nomadic attorney, who stayed there for a week a while back.

It was very nice-looking water, and not at all difficult to get to.

I forget what Gary managed here but I clambered downstream, caught several smallish browns on a dry-dropper rig, the specifics of which I also forget, and tickled something more substantial in a deep chute. It was a little ambiguous if I had gone past the state land boundary so I cheesed it. Besides, the sun came out and the water temp, already close to the plimsoll mark at 64, was starting to climb.

On the way out I had an encounter with Dr. Boing-Boing. This is Gary’s term for an angling-related freakout. “Oh bleep where are my keys?” “Oh bleep I left my rod on the car roof.” “Oh bleep I...”

In my case, I dropped the nymph box and scattered about $100 worth of flies around. I recovered about half of them. I had been meaning to clean out that particular box, but not that way.

With rising temps in mind, we tried for smallies from the shore at the Ashokan Reservoir. We caught panfish on what Gary calls “Mr. Wiggly,” which is any kind of Chernobyl-type foam terrestrial fly, but of bronzebacks we saw nothing. We also encountered the wraith of John Burroughs, if John Burroughs liked to tool around with a savage dog barely restrained by what appeared to me to be a completely inadequate leash.

As I departed the ancestral estate Friday morning, Momma Turkey and her three turkeylets strolled into the yard, hoping to get outside a worm or two. Momma Turkey bid me farewell, and, probably, good riddance.

Gary Dodson deployed “Mr. Wiggly” to no avail. Photo by Patrick L. Sullivan