This Creek Is Clearly My Favorite

My mentor Alois “Louie” R. introduced me to stream fishing for trout in 1961. He was quite an outdoorsman: he had a “camp” in the Southern Tier, rifles and shotguns, a beagle named “Pepper” that was poison on rabbits, deer heads on the wall, and an old bamboo fly rod with an automatic fly reel that he used to drift salted minnows downstream. His son was grown and chasing other things by 1961, so Louie picked me up as a sort of “project kid.” I thought he was 10 feet tall.

One day around 1980, I was drifting salted minnows down stream with absolutely no luck when, after maybe 500 yards of work, I bumped into a father-son team fishing dries upstream. The father was maybe 65, the son 40ish. I asked if I might follow behind them to watch how this here fly fishing stuff was done. They said sure, come on along, and with that they continued fishing up through the stretch I’d just spent an hour wading through.

I was dumbfounded. They immediately began catching fish - nice fish for that stream - in water I had just muddled through. They were fishing one rod, alternating with each fish caught and released, and they must have caught 8 or so in the next hour. It may have been a good or average evening for them, but it was transformational for me. Clearly this fly fishy stuff worked.

Within a week, I caught a trout on a fly for the first time. It was on different water - Tonawanda Creek, to be exact - and the fly, of all things, was a #12 Hornberg that I’d picked up at the local Orvis shop. I’d initially been apprehensive whether I could make the dry fly thing work, so I asked the salesman to recommend something wet. How he suggested a Hornberg, and why I bought it, both seem a mystery now.

It didn’t take long after that for my personal dry fly style to emerge and solidify. I like to fish when I like to fish. That is, if I have four hours free and the fishing muse is chewing on my ear, then away I go. It doesn’t matter to me at all if it’s “the wrong time,” or whether the right hatch is coming off or not, or the solunar tables say “stay home.” The fish better accommodate my schedule, dammit. I realized that I didn’t need several boxfuls of flies to match all the hatches if I wasn’t going to dance to their tune anyway. I bought a bunch of Adams in #14 and #16 and I was off to the races. I later learned to add elk hair caddis flies in the same size. That was that until my eyes couldn’t follow a #16 black caddis or Adams as well as they used to. I added Ausable Wulffs to the box and got happy again. So now I have a 6-compartment fly box about the size of a pinochle deck for all my fake bug needs.

Today I fished the creek where that father-son team first slipped me the fly fish Kool Aid 30 years ago. There’s no need to keep it a secret: it’s Clear Creek, home to lovely little stream bred rainbows.

I immediately hooked up with a good fish for that water - it had my new 4 weight rod quite excited - and, desperately wanting to get a good photo of it for this blogpost, I tried to “get it on the reel.” Why I tried that with only 15-20’ of line out is beyond me. Needless to say, the fish broke off.

But I soldiered on and, after landing another fish that broke off in my attempts to photograph it, finally caught a fish who didn’t mind having its picture taken. For those who haven’t tried it, it’s easier to catch ‘em than to photograph ‘em. We’ll try to post some photos that are a bit more impressive as the summer rolls along.

This wild rainbow from Clear Creek took a #16 Ausable Wulff