Upper West Branch Report

It's been cool and a little rainy around here leaving the water conditions much better than normal for this time of year. The West Branch Delaware at Walton was at around 100 CFS tonight, up a little from the recent rains, but still quite clear. I'd love to see it up around 200-250 CFS, but the water is cooling off nicely so I took a break from warm water fishing and headed down to Walton to try out some hopper and cricket patterns and a few comparadun variations I had worked up.

There wasn't much in terms of surface activity and no obvious hatches going on tonight, but I found a few fishy spots (mostly fast riffles emptying into deeper runs) and did some prospecting. Sadly, I lost my hopper fairly early on to a fly-eating multiflora rose. I found that particularly painful as I had no backup and the damn thing took me a good 20 minutes to tie. The black cricket pattern I based it on worked well though. I had three hook-ups and landed two, both browns.

Being black and riding low, the cricket was very hard to spot in the fast water, so I tied on my trusty comparadun, a mahogany colored size 12, and went back to work. Again, the fly performed and landed several more browns, a 10" small mouth bass, and few river chubs, just for good measure. The trout and bass were all caught in faster water where the Isos like to hatch and the oxygenation is higher. Wading back to my car, I saw fish rising in a long, slow-moving run. I had a feeling they were chubs, and I wasn't disappointed. With the water so low and clear (and probably a bit warm and stagnant), the trout head elsewhere for their food, shelter, and comfort.

Oak Creek Report

I decided to scout out some new water on my day off so I headed west of Cooperstown to Oak Creek, the stream the flows out of Canadarago Lake. I started my search near Cattown, but I couldn't find a decent way to access the water there so my journey took me upstream to the town of Schuyler Lake where I found a bridge near a small dam.

A rather nice local gentlemen who was putting his canoe in the water informed me that from that dam the quiet water extended all the way up through the forest to Canadarago Lake proper and, from what I gather, is an amazing warm water fishery accessible almost exclusively by floating.

Well, I had been planning on trout fishing, but the water near the bridge looked promising so I gave it a go. I'm not going to bother much with fly selection here because the small mouths and perch hit pretty much everything I threw at them sub-surface and even a misshapen Henry's Fork Hopper on top. Streamer, bugger, nymph, crayfish all landed fish and an olive and black wooly bugger even drew a huge largemouth out of hiding to follow it all the way in to shore. It didn't take the offering, but it was certainly enough to get my heart pounding when that behemoth emerged from the shadows.