Tag: fly fishing

Nanticoke Creek

April 28, 2024 / stflyfisher

On the mainland of America, the Wampanoags of Massasoit and King Philip had vanished, along with the Chesapeakes, the Chickahominys, and the Potomacs of the great Powhatan confederacy (only Pocahontas was remembered). Scattered or reduced to remnants were the Pequots, Montauks, Nanticokes. Machapungas, Catawbas, Cheraws, Miamis, Hurons, Eries, Mohawks, Senecas, and Mohegans. Their musical names remained forever fixed on the American land, but their bones were forgotten in a thousand burned villages or lost in forests fast disappearing before the axes of twenty million invaders. Already the once sweet-watered streams, most of which bore Indian names, were clouded with silt and the wastes of man; the very earth was being ravaged and squandered. To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature – the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy glades, the water, the soil, and the air itself.

Dee Brown

Last month I enjoyed a two-day spate of good fly fishing for stocked brown trout in a small put-and-take fishery in northern Broome County. The weather was much un-like March with temps reaching the mid 60’s by late afternoon. With those afternoon highs came little black stoneflies, fluttering clumsily to lay eggs on the water, bouncing off the creek’s surface as if suspended by silly string from above.

I’ve fished Nanticoke Creek in early spring for years as a general tune-up for spring, summer, and fall fishing to follow, just as I have it’s bigger and better brother to its west, Owego Creek. It’s stocked in late March with one- and two-year-old browns, the 8″ to 10″ one-year olds far outnumbering the 12″ to 15″ two-year olds.

A typical 2-year-old brown from Nanticoke Creek

Nanticoke Creek runs from its headwaters near Nanticoke Lake some 22 meandering miles to where it empties into the Susquehanna River. It averages 20 feet in width and has a gravel and rubble bottom, though lower reaches can tend to silt up. It flows through forests of hardwoods and majestic hemlocks above the junction where the East Branch joins the Main Branch. Below this stretch, its environs are more typically abandoned farmland and residential areas.

Nanticoke Creek is stocked at three points along its 22-mile length. The lower stocked reach consists of half a mile of mostly featureless water from the confluence with the Susquehanna River upstream to the Route 26 bridge. This section is stocked annually with around 840 year-old brown trout and 90 two year-old brown trout. The second stocked reach runs from Pollard Hill Road upstream to Cross Road and is stocked with around 1,780 year-old and 190 two year-old brown trout. The last of the three stocked sections is the East Branch of Nanticoke Creek, from the confluence with Nanticoke Creek upstream roughly a half a mile. This reach is stocked with 170 year-old and 20 two year-old brown trout.

Nanticoke Creek is considered decent trout water above Maine, NY: the farther downstream one fishes, the warmer it gets once Spring matures. I’ve been told by conventional fishermen that the mouth at the Susquehanna can be a great place to catch large muskies, that apparently lay in wait for hatchery candy to foolishly foray into the river.

Looking upstream towards the junction pool on a snowy winter day.

J. Michael Kelly, in his excellent book, Trout Streams of Central New York, rates Nanticoke Creek a 3 out of 5 in terms of its trout fishing appeal, noting that the creek is fished hard in Spring by Broome County residents but adding that “it’s reassuring, in this age, to encounter a decent trout stream that has so few KEEP OUT signs.” Indeed, according to the DEC, there are 1.3 miles of public fishing rights (PFR) along Nanticoke Creek and three official PFR parking areas.

Looking downstream on the Nanticoke towards the Ames Road bridge. This stretch is characteristic of the upper Nanticoke, which is a pretty little stream, in places flanked by deep hemlock groves that no doubt preserves snowpack and casts shade, keeping its water temps more suitable for trout.

By late spring the creek is largely forgotten by anglers, the stockies having been hammered for weeks, their destiny often a well-buttered skillet. Given the annual stocking Nanticoke Creek gets, there is always the possibility of a holdover. I remember one such fish reported at a TU meeting at well over 18″, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

Despite is piscatorial mediocrity; Nanticoke Creek is still worthy of respect. It is named after the indigenous Nanticokes, who by fate, were the first native Americans to have contact with Captain John Smith in 1608. While exploring Chesapeake Bay, Smith and his crew had sailed up the Kuskarawaok River. The Kuskarawaoks, later known as the Nanticokes, cautiously watched Smith’s ship from the shore, climbing into the trees for a better look. When Smith approached the shore in a boat, the Nanticoke answered with arrows. Smith prudently anchored for the night in the middle of the river.

Several Nanticokes agreed to serve as guides for Smith to continue his exploration of the Kuskarawaok, now known as the Nanticoke River. Smith described the Nanticoke as “the best merchants of all.” In Algonquian, the common Indian language of Northeastern tribes, the word Nanticoke is translated from the original Nantaquak meaning the tidewater people or people of the tidewaters.

Over time, of course, the Powhatan Tribes faced conflicts with European settlers. Some of the Nanticoke, tired and disgusted, chose to accept an offer from the Six Nations of the Iroquois in New York, Pennsylvania, and Canada. Though they were once enemies, the Iroquois promised the Nanticoke both land and protection. Starting in 1744, some individual families left in dugout canoes and traveled north up the Susquehanna River, settling near Wyoming Pennsylvania and along the Juniata River while others migrated slightly north into New York, where they established a settlement in what became the town of Nanticoke.

Someday I hope to bring my grandson to Nanticoke Creek so that he may feel the tug of a feisty brown on a fly on the swing. There we’ll spend the better part of a day in the quiet of the woods, where I’ll tell him about the indigenous people who once walked these same paths, hunting, fishing, and harvesting, far from their tidewater home. And maybe, if we listen carefully to the wind song of the hemlocks, we’ll hear them speak for themselves about the great beauty and provision that is Mother Nature, and so worthy of a future much like they enjoyed.

Fluke in Chablis Sauce

April 20, 2024 / stflyfisher

I opened a favorite book and found the laminated recipe, titled Fluke in Chablis Sauce, handwritten in my mother’s perfect script. As with all things her, it was both beautifully positive, ending with Bon Appetit! Reading it brought me back to the day we followed it.

That day dawned bright pink around the edges of the horizon, and I was out fly-fishing Double Creek, a place where the tidal flood and ebb of Barnegat Bay etches deep channels in its soft shifting sands. I was fishing the inside of the dike, a man-made spit of land and a place of bayberry snags, sod banks, and with the west wind, horrendous swarms of biting greenhead flies.

An aerial view of Barnegat Bay. To the right is the inlet and at center pointing north (up) is the dike. To the left of the dike is Double Creek, the haunts of big fluke that hold below the channel edges, feeding up during summer.

Fluke, known as summer flounder in the south, are a favorite species of anglers there. They are a staple of summer fishing on Long Beach Island, NJ, a place of memories that still brings me back. Fluke enter the saltwater bays of the mid-Atlantic in early summer. They are drawn by the warming of the water and return to the home of their rearing with the turning of the season to summer. There they take up haunts, hiding in the bay bottom, perfectly camouflaged, ambushing prey. They are there for the plenty of the season, becoming larger and highly predatory as they grow into their 12 – 14 years on this good earth.

Some fluke caught party boat fishing – my nephew Jake in the middle and my father to the right.

These were the early days of my mother’s shining light dimming. She stood beside me as we followed the steps, adorning two large fluke fillets from my morning trip with the recipe’s contents, a work of art to be delightfully enjoyed and not forgotten. At this stage in her disease, my mother was still “with it” as one might say. You could forgive her repeating or forgetting things, but you could not forgive where it would go.

We worked together, my mother executing the small tasks I gave her with her usual precision, as she had once done the larger tasks of life, graduating high school valedictorian, marrying and bringing three children into this world, cooking, cleaning, editing papers, reviewing homework, running a sales office, and all else that makes a life.

We placed the dish in the oven, set at 400 degrees, and in 40 minutes, the baking was done. I retrieved and placed the platter at the center of the table, the dish still bubbling, the now-ivory fillets simmering. I then ladled the Chablis cream sauce over the fillets, thin slices of lemon atop them. Mom was seated and seemed well-pleased with the meal. Garden-fresh asparagus was served alongside the plated fluke, with a spring greens salad. We all toasted the meal with chilled martinis.

I’ll selfishly admit it was a delicious dinner. The fluke was velvety mild, the Chablis sauce like butter with a touch of fruity nose from the Chablis. We sat and quietly enjoyed the meal – my father characteristically silent as he inhaled large portions of it – meaning it was very good. My mother ate at her piece, eliciting compliments all the while but never truly cleaning her plate.

Years after she passed, my sister and I shared such a meal during a visit. “You know”, she said, “Mom never liked fish”. I was dumbfounded – never had I heard or thought such a thing. She always raved, even when I prepared the strong-flavored bluefish we’d catch through summer and fall. But that was Mom – never self-indulgent, ever selfless. Always the focus was on you.

We had more meals of the bounty of the sea in the following years as my mother’s candle dimmed, and they were all good, but unbeknownst to me still then, not to her liking.

Stephen Covey, esteemed author of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” once wrote about the social-emotional connection that is the foundation of so much of life. One father he knew, sensing his son’s distance, wanted to more deeply connect with his young son, who was a baseball addict. This father decided that he and his son would attend a game in every city in which his son’s favorite team played across the country for a year, an obviously huge commitment in time and money. Upon hearing the plan, Covey commented to the father, “you must really like baseball to do such a thing”, to which the father replied. “No, I don’t like baseball, but I love my son.”

And so it was with my mother to the last of her days, that she loved me far beyond her own likes, favoring my own.

Remembering Don…

August 5, 2021 / stflyfisher

In memory of Donald A. Calder
A great bass fisherman, an even better fisher of men…
9/5/29 – 8/3/15

I quartered my streamer up-current and let it sink, dead drift, in the river braid. As it swept past me, I pulled it back in short strips interspersed with a pause – letting the olive marabou and the silly legs of the fly do an enticing water dance. Midway back the fly stopped abruptly and I swept-set the hook. My fly rod took a deep bend with the pull of a solid fish. Nothing exploded skyward on the set, so I knew this was not a smallmouth bass. Whatever this was just throbbed in the current, moving powerfully upriver, then twisting back with random but decidedly heavy surges that tested my drag. The fight continued a time; a tug of war followed by heavy sullen plodding. I started to think I had a big channel catfish on the line.

The fish continued the fight even at my feet, then finally emerged, turning away once more with the slap of its tail. I saw in that boil of river water, green and gold and white and began to wonder about this “catfish.” Then I brought to hand the biggest walleye of my fly fishing life…

I pulled him up carefully, respectful of his canines and sharp gill plates, and laid him where the river lapped the bank. Standing back with camera in hand, I marveled at his length, the green mottling of his back against golden-hued flanks and his ivory-white underbelly. His river camouflage was that of a warplane – coloring that made him invisible against the sky from below and perfectly invisible against the river bottom when seen from above.

After a quick picture I returned the walleye to the river. With one hand beneath his broad pectoral fins and the other grasping the narrow of his tail, I held him head-up into the current. His gills flared and as I felt the life come back to him, I loosened my grip at the base of his tail. With a strong sway of his head he pulled away and slipped back to the river, swimming slowly across the braid, melting into the bottom. And that is when I remembered Don and smiled to myself at the thought of his disdain for walleyes: “they fight like a bag of rocks”, I’d heard him say on more than a few occasions.

“All Americans believe that they are born fishermen. For a man to admit a distaste for fishing would be like denouncing mother-love or hating moonlight.”
John Steinbeck

It was in August of 2015 that I got a call from Bill – Don’s son and a best high school friend – that Don had passed away from cancer. And so I made my way down to northern New Jersey on a hot humid day to attend his memorial service and to give the family my personal condolences. The service was light-hearted, as I am sure Don would have wanted it. Afterwards, there was a reception at “The Legion”, a place Don frequented to have a beer with old warriors.

Now, some 6 years since Don forever hung up his spinning rod, I continue to fly fish and I think of Don. I target the smallmouth bass, my favorite gamefish – and Don’s favorite as well. But us anglers cannot always choose the fish that respond to our offerings. And on that recent foggy summer morning, a walleye took my fly, and Don came down to earth…

A part of my personal philosophy is that fishermen are born but never really die. Those that eventually slip the grips of gravity end up hanging around us, the water-bound, and watch the casts we make. We are reminded of these old fishermen in odd ways. When I am lucky enough on my home water, a nice smallmouth will launch skyward after taking my streamer and will invariably bring a smile to my face just as it did for Don. I pass an angler at the fishing access, enjoying a cold can of Budweiser after a hot day on the river, and I am again reminded of him, a tall lanky guy who sported a ball of a beer belly later in life, and who was rarely seen when land-borne without a Bud in hand. The wind whips up on the river and there he is again – Don just hated the wind, though as a spin fisherman, I never completely understood why – us fly fishers have a bit more of a valid objection. Pike remind me of him too – that peculiar smell of their slime has never left me ever since first landing one on a big Mepps spinner fished from Don’s boat. And of course there are stories from times I did not fish with him – the time Don used a large spring-device to keep a pike’s toothy yap open while removing a hook. After removing the hook, Don released the pike, forgetting that he needed to remove the spring!

Don was more than a fisherman who could tell stories. He could engage one so very well that once he caught you, it was rare you’d ever want to be released from his sense of humor and maybe too, his wisdom. For memories of fish and fishermen have always been magical in their ability to grow larger than life. The smallmouth Don caught and released will always be bigger than my own. This is a fisherman’s right, just as it is to pick and choose the stories that we leave behind. And, as with Don, a fisherman but always first a fisher of men, some of them scorn walleyes…

Home with the water…

December 18, 2020 / stflyfisher

Having harbored two sons in the waters of her womb, my mother considers herself something of an authority on human foetuses. The normal foetus, she says, is no swimmer; it is not a fish-, seal-, eel-, or even turtlelike: it is an awkward alien in the liquid environment – a groping land creature confused by its immersion and anxious to escape. My brother, she says, was such a foetus. I was not. My swimming style was humanoid butterfly-, crawl-, back-, or breaststroke: mine were the sure, swift dartings of a deformed but hefty trout at home with the water, finning and hovering in its warm black pool.
The River Why, David James Duncan

My mother never really fished. I recall one story from the days when she was dating my father when they took a day trip to fish for cod but I’ve never seen her with rod in hand – not even a picture. No, she was not a fisher, but she brought me into this world, on a dark and stormy night in early March – the month of the sign of Pisces. She let me emerge from a warm pool that kept me safe and formed who I am today.

At a young age I was already wading a nearby brook catching all the squirmy things I could with my hands and a bucket, returning home wet and dirty but all smiles. On trips to the shore, it was sandy seashells and jellyfish that my mother allowed in the bathtub of our motel room, despite the protests from dad. She always put fishy things under the Christmas tree. And when I ventured forth as a boy to test the waters with rod in hand, she ensured I was dressed for the weather, properly stuffed with a hearty breakfast, and drove me to all the places I wanted to fish – the Saddle River, Wood Dale Pond, the Woodcliff Lake Reservoir and countless others places in suburban New Jersey.

Then I went out into the world and fishing expanded for me. I fished big rivers, water that went on to the horizon, places beyond my little land of upbringing, places where the little hands and buckets and zebcos of my youth would never have been enough. But always I would return to my mother and father – holidays, birthdays, Mother’s and Father’s Days, and on some occasions just to visit and fish Barnegat Bay, where my parents retired. Even then, my mother was up early to make breakfast, prepare a lunch, and cook or help cook whatever I caught. Every time I visited them, there was a copy of the local fishing paper waiting for me along with clippings of fishing reports from the Asbury Park Press.

Now, some 60 plus years since I emerged from her, I am still at home with the water, but sadly, my mother has passed. There are no more fishing papers waiting for me when I visit, and the house, attended by aides for my ailing father, is just not the same. It is not home as I knew it and I loved it.

Down deep, that pool of life – the very one that nourished me and kept me safe before – has ebbed, but a flood tide of love, the same one that brought me to my watery world, still runs strong in my heart.

barnegat light

I remember it when I fly fish the bay. The moon and the earth do their thing and as sure as fall sets leaves on fire, the water turns, from the emptying as life does for us all, to the flooding, the filling, and the rising tide that brings life back to the bay. That is when I remember Mom. She always flooded my very being, my heart, even now…

I miss you Mom…

A fly fisherman’s Thanksgiving – there’s not enough lifetime…

November 25, 2020 / stflyfisher

A recent post on a popular fly fishing website reminded of something I’m very thankful for this Thanksgiving: our endless opportunity as fly fishermen. While it is easier and easier these days to decry what seems like our nation’s going to hell in a hand basket, I can and will, with drumstick in hand, be thankful for the fact that there’s too much water to cover.

Consider this quote from Andy Mill’s well-written interview post about tarpon fly fishing guide Steve Huff:

“It makes me crazy when people say, “Oh. I know the whole Islamorada area.” You know what? Nobody knows this stuff. I mean they do not fully know it. You could never know it. There is not enough lifetime to really know it all, especially here in the Everglades. There is not enough lifetime“.

There’s not enough lifetime. We fly fishers should always be thankful for that.

I am thankful for the fact that I can fish an entire day on the Susquehanna, the Tioughnioga, the Chenango, and so many more rivers, and never see another fisherman.

I am thankful that I can rise early and spend time over a steaming cup of black coffee, and still not know where to fish, so vast are the choices. I am thankful for the spring days, when mayflowers abound…

and I can’t quite decide whether I should fish for pre-spawn smallmouth, or the wild rainbows and browns of the Delaware.

I am thankful that I can fish coldwater and warmwater, moving water and stillwater, freshwater and saltwater, in the same weekend.

Party boat fishing at night for blues off New Jersey…

And I am thankful for the spawn, and the great fish that are driven up small creeks to pass on their noble heritage.

A landlocked salmon caught from Fall Creek…

I am thankful for the endless drive of Mother Nature – for nature’s drive to procreate, for the force that fishes have to feed, and for the excitement these forces can cause. I am thankful for everything that depends on water – eagles, heron, wood ducks, mergansers, deer, otter, beaver and bear. I am thankful that they too are drawn to water.

At the end of an early morning on the river, with the fog lifting, and the day just starting for most in this world, I can’t stop pinching myself for the very fact that there’s not enough lifetime.

Happy Thanksgiving…

Long time coming…

September 9, 2020 / stflyfisher

Home is the sailor, home from sea:
Her far-borne canvas furled
The ship pours shining on the quay
The plunder of the world.
Home is the hunter from the hill:
Fast in the boundless snare
All flesh lies taken at his will
And every fowl of air.
‘Tis evening on the moorland free,
The starlit wave is still:
Home is the sailor from the sea,
The hunter from the hill.
Home is the sailor – A.E housman

This last year has been one of incredible change on so many fronts. Unemployment, re-employment, family highs and lows, extreme national social unrest, and then that monster COVID, have all served to upend much of what I once saw as stability. All of this served to delay the launch of a new and improved version of Southern Tier Fly Fisher, promised to my old blog’s readership back in November, 2019. As a master procrastinator, I’ve dilly-dallied long enough. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “You may delay, but time will not.” And so I am at last launching this new blog, imperfect as it may initially appear, with the hopes of raising old friendships, cultivating new ones, fly fishing old haunts in the literary sense, and making more discoveries of the piscatorial kind. I am back home, at last…

Tag: fly fishing

Nanticoke Creek

Fluke in Chablis Sauce

Remembering Don…

Home with the water…

A fly fisherman’s Thanksgiving – there’s not enough lifetime…

Long time coming…

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