On the first day of my vacation I decided to go check out my faithful fishing site just below the Lake Abanakee Dam. This is typically a very good site for small but feisty stocked rainbow trout. Upon arriving at the Dam I found that they were letting out quite a bit of water. This created less than optimal conditions for fishing. After fishing for an hour in vain I gave up and headed back to my temporary home.
Armed with my trusty computer I started to search for alternative fishing spots. What I found was a big surprise. It was a pond just a couple miles from our location that was stocked exclusively with rainbows and brook trout. The NY DEC has a page on their web site that tells you where certain species of trout are located. I picked a pond that had a 1/2 mile hike. After scoping it out my father-in-law and I got our fly rods hiked into the pond. Fly casting from the banks was near impossible because of the thick cover. Luckily the pond had a number of row boats for us to use. So out we went into the pond and started to cast the banks using streamers and other flies. After not much success we started to troll while rowing. It wasn’t long until we had a hit but were unable to set the hook. Shortly after this I switched to a white bunny spey fly with a pink body. It didn’t take long until we had a fish on. It was a nice 14 inch rainbow. He fought hard and made a nice jump out of the water.
Unfortunately, the hook made the fish hemorrhage and he did not survive. We brought him home and filleted him and checked the contents of his stomach. We found a belly full of red san juan type worms. See image. His stomach also had quite a bit of debris from the bottom of the pond but was still able to pick up quite a few worms.
Although I was not able to fish the Indian River this year I did find a new fishing sport that I will be sure to visit again. Next time I will look into portaging a kyack or bringing in a small trolling motor for better coverage of the pond. I am sure there are a lot more rainbows and brookies to be caught there.
