5-21-23 PA Freestone

Decided to fish a freestone in PA where there’s a large diversity of fish.  Stripers, shad, bass and trout are all likely possibilities when fishing here.  Because of this, I started out with streamers, even though the water was very low and clear. Jigging a sculp snack streamer along the bottom produced quite a few stripers in this exact spot one year ago.  I started on the downstream side of the pool and worked my way upstream.  On my first cast, I saw a flash but did not feel a take.  I moved a few feet to my left and tried again at a slightly different angle, this time I felt some weight and gave it a good hook set.  To my surprise it was a tiger trout.  Most of the trout I catch here are wild browns, but this tiger trout was likely stocked. 

I continued to work the pool and ended up landing a nice smallmouth on the same jig streamer. 

I know there were more fish that I probably could have connected with nymphing, but I really wanted to get a striper so I continued to use different streamers but was unable to connect on anything else, other than a 4” smallmouth.  I decided to hike upstream and got into some nice pocket water, at this point I switched my focus to trout and switched to a nymph set up.  The current here is very strong and usually not even wadable, however with the low flows, I was able to get into great position to fish pockets on the far bank that are usually out of reach.  The pocket water was still very strong and fast, so I set up with a perdigon on a 3mm bead and a bwo emerger on a tag.  I was able to connect on a few nice rainbows and then landed a really healthy brown that took me for a ride downstream. 

After landing him, I waded back into the spot and casted, my sighter never moved but I noticed a flash so I set the hook assuming I just had too much slack in that fast pocket water.  The fish took off upstream and felt very heavy, I immediately assumed I foul hooked it so I put a lot of pressure on the fish to try to get it off the hook.  As the fish came to the surface I clearly saw the hook was actually in the mouth and it was another really nice brown. 

At that point it was too late, the hook came off and I lost the fish.  I continued fishing the pockets and pulled out a few small 5 or 6” brown trout and decided to call it a day.  All in all, a nice mixed bag, tiger, rainbow, brown trout and some smallmouth bass.  Unfortunately, the one fish I was hoping to connect with was not cooperating, guess I’ll just have to go back and see if I can get a striper.