1-1-24 New Years in PA
New year, same story. Headed to PA again to fish because most of the water around me was completely blown out from all the recent rain. I looked up flows on the river app and found one stream that seemed somewhat fishable. I decided to head there to practice for an upcoming competition I signed up for. I’ve never done an official competition before, only some charity comps for project healing waters, so I have to change my set up to be legal for competition. The main change is my entire leader can only be twice my rod length, making it 21’ 6” which doesn’t seem like a major change, but it definitely was on this day. I had my leader connected to a euro nymphing line with a braid core made by Cortland.
My typical set up is a very long micro-leader, usually about 60’ so that my fly line never even comes out the reel. I’ve written about how I feel that benefits me in other blogs, so no need to repeat all that information. On this day, the water was still a lot higher than expected and wading was suspect. The fish were holding in the soft water close to the bank. I caught a few fish on the bank close to me, but I could not come close to the far bank. With my typical set up, I can get some really nice drifts at a distance with minimal sag, but with the euro line I could not get a quality drift with minimal drag. It took everything in me to not change my set up, but I wanted to stick to the competition rules. In normal flows, the set up would have been fine, I could wade into a closer position and still get a great drift.
I started out fishing a 3.5mm bead perdigon with a 2.3mm Tasmanian devil on a dropper tag. I caught a few fish on the Tasmanian devil early in the morning and then it slowed down. I switched over to an eggstacy egg and connected with two more browns in about 5 minutes. At that point, I got to a section of the river where I needed to cross in order to continue fishing, I got about a quarter of the way across and was up to the chest pocket of my waders and decided to back out and call it a day. A quick day, but it was definitely worth getting out and starting the new year off right.
