Each Spring I host a long weekend trip to the West Branch of the Delaware River. I offer this trip through The Canandaigua Lake Chapter of Trout Unlimited and to any interested friends. It is an affordable three night trip, a mere three hour drive from Rochester. Each year we have a good mix of return anglers, as well as newcomers to the WBD. It is a good chance to spend quality time on the water, as well as pleasant social time with fellow anglers. A dozen of us stay at the White House of the West Branch Angler’s Resort. It’s nice to be able to walk out the front door and spot rising trout in the river.
This year, the WBD didn’t disappoint. Despite our hot Spring, warm water temperatures, low flows and abundance of floating algae, we enjoyed decent conditions and respectable periods of rising fish. They bumped up the release from Cannonsville Reservoir to 340 cfs. This reduced the floating algae, helped maintain cooler temps and improved the overall quality of the fishery. For hatches we witnessed a variety of caddis, sporadic march browns, a few random green drakes, the odd isonychia, several light cahills and consistent sulphers. Patterns that represented sulpher emergers, sulpher cripples and sulpher spinners/rusty spinners caught the majority of fish. Nobody experienced a dozen fish day, but a couple of us managed to fool several 18″ to 22″ browns during the trip. The wily WBD trout were stingy if you waded sloppily, didn’t fish an extra long leader, didn’t offer a drag free downstream drift or failed to present an attractive pattern related to their insect buffet. There are so many small presentation details that put a fish down on this river.
My most memorable fish of the trip was a 21.5 inch brown that I worked for over an hour. We were fishing the Upper Gamelands and I spotted his snout, hidden in the shade and within inches of a rock. I was taking a break on the bank. I likely would have blown that fish out of the shallows. It took several minutes to stealthily move into position. The fish held in the slack water behind the rock, feeding on the edge of the minimal current. Now and then the white mouth would cleanly break the surface, but most rises were imperceptible. On a 17 foot, 6x fluorocarbon leader I presented a variety of sulpher emergers and cripples. After ten fly changes, plenty of mending, patient timing and persistence, it took one of my high vis foam rusty spinners. It’s such a glorious rush to witness the take, celebrate the dry fly hook up and watch a beefy fish rooster tail out of shallow water. It’s also nice to have a friend nearby to snap a few pictures. Each fish is memorable, while some shine. This brown, while not my largest WBD trophy, was well earned. The memory of this fish also supports my fishing ego. The following day, I couldn’t capitalize on an aggressive snout that gulped down every surface floating fly, ignoring all my offerings. That’s the way the WBD works. There are moments of greatness, times of frustration and perpetual angling scenarios to savor. All this in a beautiful setting. I can’t wait for my next trip to the WBD!
