Big Bushkill Creek

Friday was a warm sunny day - the kind of day we haven't seen many of so far this year.  Jeff Landis and I drove up to his family's place on Big Bushkill Creek where we joined his brother Aaron and our friend Dan Stephano.  Here's Dan (left) and Jeff:

I was able to sneak away for a few hours of fly fishing that afternoon.  The creek was running high but the insect hatches were spectacular.  In Eastern fly fishing culture, the prominent mayflies that hatch on many streams in mid-April are called Blue Quills and Quill Gordons, and both were in abundance.  Both flies are pale and closely resemble one another in flight, but I could distinguish the Quill Gordons by their larger size.  I also saw hundreds of small pale stoneflies fluttering around in the clumsy manner of their species.  Some of them were dropping from trees and bushes into the water, presumably to lay eggs. But even while the flies were having their crazy party, there were no rising fish, which seemed strange to me.  I tied on a lot of different imitations, eventually settling on a size 18 flashback pheasant tail nymph on 6X tippet underneath a small Royal Trude dry fly that I used as an indicator.  With some direction from Aaron, I finally found some hungry brown trout in a strong riffle downstream from Little Falls.  The first couple of fish predictably ate the nymph.  To my great surprise, the largest and last trout I caught rose to take the Trude, perhaps mistaking it for a stonefly.   Here was the scene on the Big Bushkill:

Friday night stretched long into Saturday morning after we all ate grilled steaks and stood around a campfire swapping tales and sipping wine.  We were a little slow to get up and around on Saturday, but pulled ourselves together enough to venture out and cut down some errant trees threatening the Landis's road and apple trees.  By noon a light rain turned into a cascade of water and we were forced inside.  I thought about donning my waders and raincoat and heading back to the creek, but the wind kicked up and the downpour was out of hand.  So I took a nap instead.

The sky had brightened again by the time we got up Sunday morning.  When I got out of the shower and looked out the window of my bedroom, I saw a large tom turkey and several hens on the driveway.  A short time later Aaron spotted the tom in the front yard, following two jakes.  Apparently he was trying to drive them away from his harem.  When he had sufficiently harrassed the younger males, he turned back down the drive and rejoined the females.  The tom was quite a sight:

All my fishing adventures this year, from Florida to Wyoming and several spots in Pennsylvania, have had a common element - less-than-ideal weather and water conditions, making for tough fishing.   But I'm not complaining, because these outings have been as much or more about the camaderie of friends and my love of nature than anything else.  Good companions, flora and fauna - I don't need much else.