
This smallmouth bass ignored the tempting green Gurgler and instead took a reverse-hackle wet fly typically used in Tenkara angling. Fish are funny that way.
Patrick L. Sullivan
This smallmouth bass ignored the tempting green Gurgler and instead took a reverse-hackle wet fly typically used in Tenkara angling. Fish are funny that way.
The dog days have arrived.
This phrase refers to the summer, which brings heat, which makes trout unhappy.
During the dog days, anglers have to watch the skies and the thermometer. A stream thermometer, in particular.
The rule of thumb is: No trout fishing when the water temperature hits 68 degrees. When the water gets to 68 or above, there is less dissolved oxygen, which makes it harder for trout to breathe.
That’s why the Housatonic River has several designated thermal refuge areas, where little creeks or springs trickle into the big river, providing some colder water. You’ll see trout stacked up in these places, like airplanes waiting to land at a busy airport.
Regrettably, you’ll also see unscrupulous anglers chucking stuff at these beleaguered fish.
Many of the signs designating these areas have either fallen off their trees or are obscured by brush. Addressing this would be an excellent summer project for somebody.
If you want to fish for trout your best option is a tailwater, and the closest is the West Branch of the Farmington River.
The interagency confusion that left the Farmington with low flows the last couple of years was, thankfully, resolved by the General Assembly in the recent session.
So the 20 miles or so downstream from the Godwin dam north of Riverton have been good-to-excellent in terms of flow and water temperature. Downstream from that, not so much, but that is par for the course.
This is where your stream thermometer comes in handy. I’ve got two. A digital version that clips to my pack, and a regular one that I have affixed to a long dowel, for getting a reading without getting my feet wet.
The other tailwater options I’m familiar with are in the Catskills, between one and a half and three hours driving time from Northwest Connecticut. The East and West branches of the Delaware River, below their respective dams, are the most consistent. The Neversink near Bridgeville is okay as of this writing but does warm up, and my home river, the Esopus, is usually a dawn and maybe dusk proposition.
All of these rivers can be found on the United States Geological Survey water data website, where there will be info on flow, water temperature, and sometimes turbidity.
Back to the Housatonic. The river is home to approximately 100 kajillion smallmouth bass, who don’t mind the warmer water.
This is the time to dig out a heavier rod (line weight 6-8) and that box of poppers you were convinced to buy in a weak moment at the Orvis store.
The wet fly was tied to a piece of fluorocarbon tippet which was in turn tied to the hook of the Gurgler.Patrick L. Sullivan
You can fool around with a sink-tip line, but 99% of the time a floating line is fine. The smallies will move up and down the water column without much prompting.
A shortish, stout leader is the way to go. I start with a 7.5-foot nylon leader tapered to 0X. This usually gets hacked up pretty quick, and I add additional sections of tippet, 0X-2X, as needed.
Tactics can be just about anything. Crayfish abound in the Hous; you’ll see bits of claw in the shallows. There are as many crayfish imitations as there are crayfish, it seems. But if you don’t want to buy a lot of new stuff, a brown Wooly Bugger will do the trick.
When I was new to smallmouth fishing, and didn’t know a smallie from a crab, I watched a Housatonic old-timer put on an incredible exhibition. Every second or third cast he hooked up, and not just with the immature bass (aka “dinkers”) either.
When he took a break, I asked him how he did it.
The answer: He dead-drifted a brown Wooly, size 6 or so, upstream, keeping it short, maybe a 20-foot cast.
As the line and fly went past him and started to drag, he executed a series of short jerks, using a combination of rod wiggling and line strips.
The takes usually happened a couple seconds into the dead drift, or on the swing-and-jerk.
Last week I took an early morning shot at the Hous downstream of the Falls Village power station.
This is easy to get to but tricky once you’re in, mostly because of the wires that support the kayak gates.
Look at them sometime. They are liberally festooned with lures and flies.
If you don’t know how to sidearm, you will.
I caught a couple of dinkers on a brown Wooly. Craving surface action, I switched to a gurgler, which is a green foam thing that’s supposed to look like a…I don’t know what it’s supposed to look like.
This failed to interest anything, and it was getting hot.
Just for laughs, I tied a dropper to the bend of the hook on the gurgler and attached a reverse-hackle wet fly designed for Tenkara fishing.
I let this combo drift into the shallow riffle and was pleasantly surprised when an adult smallmouth, with vertical stripes and bronze coloring, took the wet fly.
I rassled it into the net, got my exciting photo, released it and immediately left.
It’s important to know when you’ve got a good exit line.
Jazz and classical ensembles from Salisbury School and Indian Mountain School, and solo pianists and a cellist, will perform for the 43rd annual student recital at the United Congregational Church in Salisbury on Sunday, Feb. 23.
The annual student recital is returning for its 43rd year at Salisbury Congregational Church at 30 Main St.
This year’s performance is set for Sunday, Feb. 23, at 3 p.m.
Jazz and classical ensembles from Sailsbury school and Indian Mountain School as well as solo pianists and a cellist will grace the stage at the United Congregational Church.
Admission is free and donations to the church’s special music fund are encouraged.
After the performance, viewers are invited to stick around for a reception with sandwiches, chili and dessert.
Indoor track BL champs
Housatonic Valley Regional High School senior Kyle McCarron’s 1600-meter time of 4:30.31 earned him second place in this year’s indoor state meet. He was within two seconds of first-place finisher Matthew Kraszewski from Nathan Hale-Ray High School.
McCarron was one of eight runners to represent HVRHS in the 2025 Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference Class S indoor track meet at Floyd Little Athletic Center in New Haven Feb. 15. In addition to his 1600-meter silver medal, McCarron placed sixth in the 3200-meter run.
For the HVRHS girls, Mia Dodge placed fifth in the 55-meter hurdles. Dodge also placed fifth in the sprint medley relay with teammates Gabi Titone, Harper Howe and Kenzie Lotz. Howe placed eighth in the 600-meter race. Titone placed 10th in the 1600-meter race.
Patrick Money placed 10th in the boys 55-meter hurdles and 25th in the long jump. Money, Kyle McCarron, Silas Tripp and Peter Austin placed 12th as a team in the sprint medley relay.
Joy Brown installing work for her show at the Tremaine Art Gallery at Hotchkiss.
This year, The Hotchkiss School is marking 50 years of co-education with a series of special events, including an exhibition by renowned sculptor Joy Brown. “The Art of Joy Brown,” opening Saturday, Feb. 22, in the Tremaine Art Gallery, offers a rare retrospective of Brown’s work, spanning five decades from her early pottery to her large-scale bronze sculptures.
“It’s an honor to show my work in celebration of fifty years of women at Hotchkiss,” Brown shared. “This exhibition traces my journey—from my roots in pottery to the figures and murals that have evolved over time.”
Co-curated by Christine Owen, Hotchkiss ceramics instructor, and Joan Baldwin, curator of special collections, the scale and scope of the exhibition was inspired by a recent Ed Ruscha retrospective in Los Angeles. “I thought it would be incredible to showcase all these different aspects of Joy’s work,” said Owen, who has known Brown for over 30 years.
Brown’s father, a Presbyterian missionary and medical doctor, opened a hospital in Japan where Brown grew up and cultivated her love of clay. Her first apprenticeship was in Tomba, a region in Hyogo Prefecture known for its ancient pottery kilns and Tambayaki pottery. “There are thousands of years of continuous history of clay there and I was working with a 13th generation potter.” Brown recalled that as part of her early training, her teacher handed her a sake cup and said, “make these.” With no extra instruction given, Brown proceeded to make thousands of copies of the cup. Never fired, she realized that the pieces were an exercise. She explained, “You’re not really making something, you’re participating in a process that these things emerge from.” From there, she embarked on an apprenticeship with master potter Shigeyoshi Morioka. As part of the process she learned from Morioka, Brown has built a 30-foot-long wood-firing tunnel kiln on her property in Kent, Connecticut, where she fires her work once a year in an intensive month-long process. The fire’s natural interaction with the clay creates unique earth tones and ash patterns, highlighting the raw beauty of the material.
Natalia Zukerman
“I learned not just pottery but a whole way of life,” she recalled. “The work is a continuous process—like practicing a signature until it evolves into something uniquely yours.” Her figures, initially emerging as playful puppets, have since evolved into large-scale sculptures now found in public spaces from Shanghai to Broadway to Hotchkiss’s own campus.
Brown’s seven-foot “Sitter with Head in Hands” was installed near Ford Food Court in October, followed by “Recliner with Head in Hands” near Hotchkiss’s Main Building in November. She welcomes interaction with her sculptures, encouraging visitors to touch them and even dress them with scarves or hats. “These figures transcend gender, age, and culture,” Brown noted. “They’re kind of like when you’re 4 years old and you didn’t know or care what you were, you know? All of us meet in that field and I think people resonate with that.”
In conjunction with the exhibition, Hotchkiss will host a screening of “The Art of Joy Brown,” a documentary by Eduardo Montes-Bradley, followed by a panel discussion with the artist and filmmaker on March 6 in Walker Auditorium. Brown will also serve as an artist-in-residence, collaborating with students on special projects.
On being part of the celebration of women at Hotchkiss Brown said, “Fifty years ago, I was deep in the mountains of Japan, immersed in clay.” With a soft spoken and almost childlike quality, Brown spoke about and interacted with her pieces with curiosity, reverence and wonder.
“The practice of working with clay for all these years is grounding and centering for me. It challenges me,” she said. “The work forces me to put myself out there. It’s not just the making of the pieces that make me more whole, the pieces themselves become more present.”
Brown reflected on the retrospective nature of the show and shared that putting it together has been like looking at a family album. “It’s kind of like I’m seeing my whole life in front of me,” she said. “It’s humbling and makes me think about why I do what I do. It comes back to the idea of those thousands of sake cups, you know? We’re just here, being as present as we can be. We’re not making things, we’re participating in a process of being more present, and all that spirit is reflected in the work.”
“The Art of Joy Brown” opens Saturday, Feb. 22, and runs through April 6. For more information, visit www.hotchkiss.org.
This story has been updated to reflect a change in the scheduled opening date due to forecast extreme weather conditions.
A special screening of “The Brutalist” was held on Feb. 2 at the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington. Elihu Rubin, a Henry Hart Rice Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at Yale, led discussions both before and after the film.
“The Brutalist” stars Adrien Brody as fictional character, architect Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian-born Jewish architect. Toth trained at the Bauhaus and was interred at the concentration camp Buchenwald during World War II. The film tells of his struggle as an immigrant to gain back his standing and respect as an architect. Brody was winner of the Best Actor Golden Globe, while Bradley Corbet, director of the film, won best director and the film took home the Golden Globe for Best Film Drama. They have been nominated again for Academy Awards.
Laszlo Toth goes to work in his cousin’s furniture store when he arrives in New York, living in the storeroom and helping his cousin build up the business. When his cousin’s wife falsely accuses him of making a pass at her, he ends up living in a homeless shelter.
A would-be patron tracks him down, finds him working construction—the only job he can get—and asks, “Tell me, why is an accomplished foreign architect shoveling coal here in Philadelphia?”
Eventually, Toth gains a commission but faces prejudice as a foreigner and Jew, even though he and his wife, who he reunites with after she’d been in the concentration camp, Dachau, are both highly educated—she is an Oxford graduate and an established writer in their home country of Hungary.
Rubin began his discussion before the screening by saying, “I am thrilled this film has brought architecture to the forefront. There is something so fascinating and robust about the space Brutalist architecture creates.”
Brutalism is known for using “raw materials,” such as brick and concrete in ways that leave them visible. Rubin said that concrete is “incredibly expressive. It comes to the building site as mud and becomes what it is poured out as.”
“At first,” said Rubin, “optimism was associated with Brutalism.”
Brutalism came to the forefront of architecture in the 1950’s when it was used to reconstruct housing in the United Kingdom after WWII.
Some prime examples of Brutalist architecture include Boston City Hall, Rudolph Hall at Yale University, and the Temple Street Parking Garage in New Haven.
Rubin commented, “Brutalist architecture became the de-facto language of government and institutional architecture.”
Rubin said Brutalism began to fall out of favor in the 1970’s when it began to be associated with urban decay and totalitarian governments, who used it extensively.
Rubin asked the audience to consider two questions as they watched the film: “Why is the main character an architect… what does it bring to the emotional core?” and, “Who or what is the Brutalist in the film?”
After the screening, Rubin commentedtha Brutalist architecture is about “Getting an object to, ultimately, stand by itself.” Rubin explained that Brutalism “Throws off shadows of the past. No extraneous detail is left.” Audience members discussed how this could also be true of the character of Laszlo.
Rubin explained that architects face the challenge of “how to express themselves through someone else’s commission.” Discussion involved how Laszlo finds a way to achieve this.
The audience agreed that the film brought up some timely issues about immigration, class awareness, and acceptance, while asking them to consider how Brutalism applies to these subjects. The movie is at times, as rawly constructed as a brutalist building.