No fancy fishing here; the natives are restless
By GARY THOMPSON
Philadelphia Daily News
I'm fly fishing the first weekend in October at one of my favorite Pocono spots, and I'm going to pack it in early because my arm is tired.
Not from casting, which usually wears me out and sends me home, but from catching. I've just spent five minutes
wrestling with an ornery smallmouth bass that keeps running back into the deep water every time he gets close enough to see me.When I finally bring him to shore and release him, he gives me an angry look and goes back to the business of eating as much as he can in advance of the approaching winter.
I caught and released maybe a dozen fish that day, mostly rainbow trout, and this had nothing to do with expertise or preparation. I'd brought the wrong fly box and fished with out-sized streamers designed for saltwater quarry.
No matter. No cast was too bad, no fly too inappropriate, no retrieval too suspicious for these ravenous fish. To paraphrase Will Ferrell's character in "The Wedding Crashers," the fish are so hungry, it's not even fair.
These are the same fish that ignored everything I threw at them during the summer, when you have to coax them to the surface with tiny dry flies on the end of delicate lines that kink and knot and snap off when you DO hook up.
Fall in the Poconos is my favorite time to fish, because I'm lazy and it's so much easier. The weather's often ideal (not so much this year), and the trout perk up when water temperatures begin to drop in popular Pocono waters. The fish will stay active nearly until the end of the year.
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