Tangled early June 2025

When syndicated columnists get lazy they gather together bits and pieces that never made it out of the notebook, mash them together, and email it in.

Usually they try to unify the disparate items under a catch-all heading, such as “Heard on the Street” or “Things the Cabby Told Me.”

I’m working on that.

A few days before Memorial Day I was whiling away an idle hour or two on the Blackberry.

From the bridge at Beckley Furnace I observed a fellow fly-caster. We acknowledged each other, and after a couple casts he called up “Got any tips?”

I scrambled down. He was Andrew Stone of Illinois, with a teenager at one of the private schools.

I gave him the little mini-bugger I have been using with considerable success in recent years and almost immediately he was on a fish.

This was very good for my ego.

  Andrew Stone netted a trout on the Blackberry in May, thanks in part to some stellar advice from yours truly.Patrick L. Sullivan

In the last week of May I went on my first solo trip to the private fishing club water. I had my button proclaiming my status as a paid-up member attached to my hat. On advice from the club president, I also made an enlarged photocopy of said button and left it on the dashboard.

The club has an arrangement with property owners along the medium-sized stream. Three members of this particular family drove by at various times, with much waving and tooting of horns.

Armed with an old Orvis seven and a half foot four weight with a slow action and a 10-foot Tenkara rod tucked in my pack, I slithered downstream along surprisingly slick cobble, swinging a team of traditional winged wet flies below me.

Nothing happened.

Then the stream took a hard left into a long shelf formation, and here I struck gold.

Alertly noticing the casings from a bug called isonychia on the streamside rocks, I changed over to a Leadwing Coachman winged wet fly on a dropper under an iso dry fly.

I like isos. They are big, and their imitations are big too. I can see them to tie on.

Isos are also good swimmers, so instead of obsessing about the perfect drift, I can put some English on them, especially the subsurface versions.

There are typically two rounds of isonychia in the streams I frequent in New York and Connecticut. The first starts around the beginning of June and seems to taper off as July approaches.

Then it all starts again in August, and runs for a couple months. I have caught fish in the Esopus and Housatonic in late October on iso imitations.

The first brown nabbed the wet fly, and a few minutes later another sportingly took the dry.

  The first brown trout from the private fishing club stream looks much bigger than it was because I deliberately brought my smallest net.Patrick L. Sullivan

After an unfortunate encounter with some knotweed I switched over to the DragonTail Talon Mini 310, which is a fixed-line rod with a slow action that fishes at 10 feet and packs down to 12 inches when collapsed, which means it can be stuck in a shallow pocket on a vest or in the wader’s handwarming pocket or even in a pants pocket

The extra reach allowed me to simply flick the line back and forth in front of me, thus avoiding a back cast and the dratted knotweed.

Using a team of a yellow soft hackle wet in size 14 and the Leadwing, I rustled up a couple more of the truck fish from the stocking the first week of May. Neither paid any attention to the yellow fly, which I only included because I saw a yellowish bug flying around. This is called “Not Matching the Hatch.”

Back at base I next spent a thoroughly frustrating day failing to catch anything anywhere on a day that should have been perfect — overcast, warmish, drizzly. The kind of day that makes aquatic insects leap from their beds and rejoice in the promise of a new day.

After a solid five hours of fooling around I finally found some wild browns who were willing to play. They weren’t big but they were very wiggly, resulting in many “compassionate releases,” which is a convenient rationalization of the failure to land a fish.

Speaking of failure, I forgot to buy milk. Twice. So on two successive mornings I had to drink my coffee black.

I remembered to buy a quart, figuring I could bring it back to Connecticut in the cooler.

Well…

Let’s just say that as I peck this out on a rainy Saturday morning, May 31, I am enjoying a cup of black coffee.