Each year as April approaches I think of Trout Season Opening Day. April first -- April Fool's Day -- marks the beginning of the trout season in the Catskill region of New York State. In upstate New York and throughout New England the weather at the very start of April is almost always less than ideal for fishing or, for that matter, for any outdoor activity that does not involve skis or ice-skates. However, the major problem with early-season trouting is not so much the lack of warmth as it is the abundance of water.
Late winter rainstorms conspire in the Northeast with melting mountain snowcaps to release great quantities of water onto the landscape. Being water, it displays a marked tendancy to flow downhill. It washes into the trout streams of upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and eslewhere, finding its way thither in inumerable tiny streams and freshets which exist only in the early spring. Water soaks the ground and saturates the soil, turning it into soft, black and slippery mud. Throughout New England this watery phenomenon is known as " The Thaw" .
Trout streams -- especially the larger ones in the valleys that dissect the New England plateau -- are often unfishable at this time. In my world, which was the east-central region of the Catskills, the principal big river is the Esopus. In April this creek runs amber with silt, overflows its banks in many sections below Shandaken and is as frigid as the sea around Archangel. One time I found myself streamside, fly rod in reddening hands, dunking frozen wet flies in the churning glacial meltwater while oversize snowflakes fell softly all around. Up and down the stream, there were other bundled fisherfolk, breathing smoke into the snowy air and trying to manipulate fishing rods with one hand on the rod, the other pocketed. This particular day, the current streaked in rolling humps over midstream rocks that had been a few weeks earlier and would be a few weeks later more than half exposed to air. Common impediments -- split rocks or a branch of a fallen creekside tree-- which in warmer days to come would cause the by-passing water to bubble quietly and sparkle in the sun, now caused noisy breakers which burst into roaring brown-white foam that was picked up by the blustering wind and frozen in small bits, tailing upstream from the obstruction like tiny ice-storms. Ice grew between shoreline rocks that had trapped water and clung to low-slung branches that danced in the current and, thus dipping, 
lifted the swift water into the frigid air where it crystalized. The ice extended in crystal molars from these swaying twigs and chattered in the cold. The trout were off their feed under these conditions and were hidden at the bottom of the stream, hugging the downstream side of boulders. Notwithstanding, we fished.
Opening day fishers stood at the shoreline dunking baits of worms or dead minnows into the roiling water in the forlorn hope that they were not wasting their time. They were. With sullen faces made more grim by determination they cast their spinning gear, let the splitshots do their work in placing the bait into the calmer water near stream bottom and waited. They cleared ice from their rod guides repeatedly, hauled in the line, inspected the untouched bait and cast again. This, for several hours.
I recall seeing a man who had braved the bellowing waters and waded out to nearly the middle of the Esopus and was using heavy baitcasting equipment of the type normally used for northern pike. He was fishing a gang of three hooks baited with something or other and weighted with a dipsey sinker. He spent all his time tugging and pulling at his end tackle which was continually finding snags at the bottom. He did not catch anything.
My brother Al and I tried to use fly-fishing gear. Weighted nymphs and bucktails were our ploy. In such high water conditions, the flies refused to sink anywhere near the bottom where the fish were. The drag from the fly line whipped our lures toward the surface, eliminating our already slim chances. Our fly line froze stiffly, making casting nearly impossible and the tiptops of our rods became caked with ice. I switched to spinning gear for a while but could entice no strikes to a tiny Eppinger Daredevle spoon nor to a Mepps spinner. I shame-facedly switched to worms.
I was working a medium-sized and relatively calm pool with my baited hook when something took my bait and started moving slowly upstream with it. I tightened the line sufficiently to make the fish breach in a flash of brassy scales and brownish tailfin. For a moment, I thought I had a brown trout, but the fish was sluggish and fought only weakly as I brought him swiftly to the bank. " What you got is a sucker" , observed Al, who had been working his way past me to try unpromising water a little further downstream. Suckers are ugly scavenger fish which feed on the stream bottom by sucking in mud through their rounded, protruding mouths and straining out any digestible material they find there. Dirty gold with oversize scales and unfit to eat, catching a sucker counted against you in the scoring for the day. My brother was carrying the day by catching nothing, winning by a score of zero to minus-one. I threw the sucker up on the bank into some bushes, which was what noble game-fisherman were supposed to do when catching a " trash fish" . This was something I would not do today. The much-despised sucker serves an ecological function in the trout stream, cleaning it of biological debris. I should have put him back.
Snow began to fall again in those great, white flakes which seemed to be a half dozen or so flakes that had joined hands on the way down. Al and I talked strategy in smokepuff words that dropped quickly to the cold and wet ground. We were like two German officers talking strategy at Stalingrad, surrounded by frigid Russian weather and cold Russian steel. There didn't seem much point. We decided that our best course of action was to hit Elmer's Diner in the tiny town of Phoenicia and get some breakfast.
Elmer's was sort of famous in trout fishing lore. There was a large, deep pool in the Esopus directly behind the diner from which many great trout had been taken by Art Flick, Sparse Gray Hackle, Ray Bergman and other famous fisherman. I myself had one day caught a decent brown trout there.The diner itself had its points of interest. The fry cook, who may have been Elmer himself, for all I know, had fingers missing from each hand, but could still crack an egg without breaking the yolk. We sat at a booth and ate our breakfast. Afterwards, we nursed our coffee letting its warmth drive the streamside cold from us. We talked fishing and bandied ideas about. We thought we might get upstream of Phoenicia, perhaps upstream of Shandaken above the portal where the discharge from the Schoharie and Pepacton reservoirs enters the river. We hoped we might find calmer, less silty water.
Sitting amid the relaxing aroma of coffee, eggs and bacon, the coversation of a few old timers who were seated at the counter gradually filtered into our consciousness. " This is probably the first place they'd hit, too" , observed a gaunt old man in maroon suspenders and white dress shirt. " You betcha your sweet ass" , affirmed one of his companions who was wearing an old fashioned railroad engineers pinstriped cap, " they blow out the Ashokan dam and New York City is flat out of water, lickety split" . Al and I looked at each other. This was bad news for Al, as he lived in Kingston, not very far away. It was bad news for me, too. I lived near New York City. These old fellows, who lived in this tiny town, seemed to take comfort in the idea that the godless commies were plotting their destruction. Many thousands of miles away, inside the sinister Kremlin walls, dark and evil minds stayed up nights thinking, confering and drafting their plans to neutralize Phoenicia, New York, casting covetous eyes on its natural resources. Al smiled. So did I.
I never travelled anywhere in the United States during the Cold War where the locals thought that the Russkies were unconcerned with them. It is satisfying to think that one's own little corner of the world is remarkably important. So much so that a hostile foreign power would take great pains to eliminate the threat it poses to them. So it was for these old men from Phoenicia. Indeed, Phoenicia was important -- still is. But it was not important for any global strategic reasons. It was important because it had a great trout stream, a cozy hotel, Folkert's general store, and eateries like Elmer's Diner and the Plank Road Kitchen. Those were reasons unknown to the Russians, so pity the poor Russians.
Al and I finished breakfast and coffee and stepped from the comfy warmth of Elmer's into the cold of a raw, wet and gray April first in upstate New York. We drove up through Shandaken past an Esopus River lined with forlorn fisherfolk collecting their skunking. At the portal, a dozen meat fisheman, armed with heavy baitfishing rigs, sank lines deep into a swirling brown maelstrom. We watched them for twenty minutes without seeing a single take. The stream looking no better above the portal, we reversed direction and headed all the way down to the spillway at the Ashokan impoundment. There we watched walleyed-pike fishermen, using minnows suspended beneath bobbers to lure their glassy-eyed and sharp-toothed quarry. The water was brimming over the spillway noisily enough that we could not hear the conversations of these fishermen from our vantage point on the bridge, but they were shaking their heads, looking down at their boots and keeping their hands in their pockets as their rods stood in holders stuck in the ground. Things seemed to be awfully slow. The water here was crystal clear but frigid in the extreme. There was still thin ice skimming the surface in the reservoir proper, and the fishermen had gathered here because the agitation of the spillway kept it clear of ice.
As we watched, against all expectation a rod began to dance in its holder. A fisherman grabbed it and began to haul in his prize. A companion reached out with a long-necked net and scooped the fish out of the icy water. It was a sucker, even bigger than the one I had caught earlier.
We left. We returned to the stream for an hour or so. I tied a Mickey Finn bucktail streamer to my stiff leader. I hoped its bright yellow-red-silver gaudiness would be noticable in the murk of the Esopus and might draw a strike. I couldn't keep it near the bottom, of course, and spent most of my time clearing ice from my rod tip. The gray day wore on with rain mixed with snow, then snow, then light rain again. Looking up at the mountains that surrounded us, I saw the mist and cloud that were snaking out of the notches bringing these altering patterns of precipitation with them. It was so ugly it was beautiful.
Our total take for that Opening Day: one sucker caught, one seen caught. It was a good day for suckers that April Fool's Day. I loved every minute of it.
return to John Lockwood's Page
© 20 June 1998