You Must Take What the River Gives You
by Brian Ellis
On Thursday April 10th Wes Sebacher cashed in on his graduation trip outing. I, Brian Ellis, had the privilege of being the instructor for the day. Kenny added Glenn Haake and me to the FATC instructor roster last fall. Ken Welter was the only other FATC member that joined us. The three of us piled into my car at 6:15 AM and left the Commuter lot as usual and headed to Montauk State Park.
With all the rain the area had the previous weekend, I was a bit concerned that the stream might still be too high and off color for our trip. According to the Montauk water gauge, the stream was flowing 6 feet above normal 5 days prior on Saturday. I know the stream conditions had been rapidly improving because I had been watching the stream gauges all week and early in the morning prior to leaving the house. However, when we arrived, the stream was higher and more off color than I anticipated but still fishable. Always check the gauges before your trips to avoid any surprises and to develop the skill of correlating the flow numbers to stream conditions. Also, know where the stream gauges are specifically located. The Montauk gauge is located just downstream of the park boundary. Most of the stream gauge data where we fish can be accessed from our FATC web site under EDUCATION/Water Conditions.
I had fished Montauk two weeks earlier, and so I knew that there were still a lot of hatchery escapees in the stream from the catastrophic November flood, however many larger fish are continually being harvested and some of the remaining fish are small and/or quite thin. Unfortunately, only the bait areas adjacent to the hatchery raceways received the benefit of the trout escapees and the fly-only areas seemed to be devoid of fish (except the Catch and Release area directly below its adjacent raceways received a shot of escapees). I’m disappointed about how much the fly only area has been scoured out by the floods. There seems to be many places that were once wadable that have been replaced with high banks and deep water that are no longer wadable. Also, it’s likely to take a few weeks of stocking and hopefully the volunteer releasing of fish to restore the fish counts to what we were used to in that section.
The first thing that we did when we arrived was to visit Montauk Lodge to purchase our daily tags and make a men’s room pitstop. The first lesson of the day was taught, “Always pee BEFORE you put on you waders”. As we were leaving the lodge, I noticed that there weren’t any cars parked at the Governor’s hole behind the lodge. I decided to pull in there and check it out prior to parking at the usual spot at the naturalist cabin. There was still a great deal of fish visible in that section and we decided to start fishing at that spot. I knew that we could wade over to the island and have enough variety of water types to do our stream instruction. With the high and off-color stream conditions, you must take what the stream gives you.
Wes Sebacher did well on his graduation trip. He is an experienced fly fisher, and I knew him already from assisting Kenny during his fly-fishing class. We went to a spot that was just loaded with fish and Wes quickly landed his graduation fish. I then had Wes pose for his graduation fish photo. I insisted that he remove his sunglasses for every photo, even though he thought he looked cooler with them on. After he caught that fish, I impressed upon him the need for us to be diligent in keeping an accurate fish count for the day. We were presented with an unusual situation of having all those hatchery escapees in the stream and I felt confident that he would set the record for the number of trout caught by a FATC member on their graduation trip. Before launch Wes had landed precisely 45 trout.
Wes caught them on nymphs, wet flies, dry flies and streamers. He tipped me off by telling me he didn’t care much for indicator nymphing, so guess what? I spent a lot of time working on his indicator nymphing techniques. Before long, I heard my voice echoing down the stream yelling, “Mend”, “Mend”, “Mend” just as I heard Kenny do before I met him. Oh my gosh! I’ve become Kenny!
Wes told me that he attended the FATC tying session the previous evening with Scott Payne teaching his legendary House of Payne (HOP) nymph. Wes showed me the HOP he tied with the help of John Steuterman’s sharing of his tying tools. We promptly tied that fly on and caught a fish. Then I quickly removed it, and I suggested that he might want to save it. Wes is experienced and adequate in tying on flies, however, I attempted to stressed to him how important it was to practice and quicky tie your knots, he said that he was impressed. I mostly tie flies on using the Double Davy Knot which is taught in Kenny’s fly-fishing class and a video demonstration is available on the FATC web site at Education/Fly Fishing Knots.
To avoid the more numerous smaller fish, it sometimes helped to sink a weighted nymph deeper where the bigger fish are waiting. Also, a bigger visual dry fly or woolybugger could be cast purposely to the larger fish and pulled away if a dink was about to take it. The fish were hungry, and they readily took practically any fly thrown. It was more enjoyable fishing a dry fly but the takes where so frequent that it was difficult keeping them afloat and so they had to be frequently dressed with fly floatant.
Ken Welter fished close by us for the morning session, and he said that he had fantastic fun and landed 65 fish. He had great success fishing a dry fly that was once suggested to him by Al Blair called a Headlight Caddis (Tan), size #16.
At 11:45 AM we decided to take our lunch break and head over to the usual Dan Stag tables at the Naturalist’s Cabin.
After lunch, we took Wes over to the Catch and Release Area below the Montauk pond output raceways. The area was full of fish from the November flood and many were quite large. Wes and Ken decided to fish there for a while, and both caught fish but none of the monsters. Ken decided to head over to the fly-only area starting at the power line cables and working downstream. Wes and I followed shortly. The area was still running high and off color and looked difficult to fish. When we caught up with Ken at the boulder, he said that he had caught only one fish in the fly-only section right there at the boulder, however, it was his nicest fish of the day.
The guys decided they wanted to finish the day in the area behind the lodge where we started, so we drove back there. Wes still was using a size #10 stimulator dry fly that he had on since fishing the Catch and Release Area and was still catching fish on it. Eventually, he lost the stimulator in the bushes and decided to finish the day by making long casts and stripping a woolybugger, his preferred method to fish. Again, he caught many more fish. I was sitting on the bank photographing Wes making some long, beautiful casts. He landed a fish and then reeled in his line and said that it was his 75th fish and he was done. It was 4:30 PM, our previously agreed upon quitting time, so we decided to call it a day.
Ken said that he had his best day ever at Montauk and stopped counting fish in the afternoon session after landing 35 fish, making it over a 100 fish day for him. Ken vowed, in the future, to continue to always listen to the advice of an instructor if he suggests where to fish.
As we were leaving Montauk for the drive home, we commented that it was a glorious day. The weather was beautiful, except the wind was sometimes high, but no big deal if you’re okay with getting your hat blown off a couple of times.
On the way home we stopped and celebrated with a graduation dinner at American Taco in Rolla.
