An angler’s year testing rods, riversides and patience

I was very optimistic as winter loosened its grip in the early part of 2025. I had a couple new rods to play with, my rotator cuff problem on my casting arm was resolved in a satisfactory manner, and I joined a private fishing club in the Catskills and was looking forward to exploring new water.

Some of the exploring and trying new things with new rods happened, but a lot of it did not. I blame Nature.

(Listening to anglers complain about the weather is as tedious as it gets, so feel free to skip the next bit.)

Just for laughs I plotted out the Housatonic flow from April 1 to Nov. 22 on the United States Geological Survey website. What I got back was an inverse bell curve, with high flows at the extremes and a long period of very low flows in between.

Amazingly, this corresponds to the rain, or lack thereof, between April 1 and Nov. 22. It’s just science.

So, looking back at the Tangled archives and my own hastily scribbled journal notes, I see that I started out when the snow and ice were still on the ground on the Blackberry in North Canaan and Macedonia Brook in Kent.

I do remember trying out a short rod, 6-feet 10-inches, from Zen Tenkara. I used it with two-fly rigs, including weighted flies, which should not work in theory, but it did in practice. The biggest problem was when a guy in the parking lot asked me what it was. I said, “It’s a Hachi” and the guy said, “Gesundheit.”

Eddie Curtis of New Jersey amused himself catching little smallmouth bass in the Housatonic during a Trout Unlimited event in August.Patrick L. Sullivan

I had an interesting encounter with a couple of DEEP guys who were putting some brown trout fry in the Blackberry, since they had them to spare and were wondering what would happen. I suggested that they would get eaten up fairly quickly by the adult trout and they agreed but did it anyway.

The private water was a bust. There’s no other way to put it. I got there three times all year, and by the beginning of July the drought had settled in and the stream was nothing but a trickle.

I’m going to reup because I enjoyed meeting my fellow club members and the nice landowners who allow us to barge around their properties This year I’m going to hit it often and hard in May and June, circumstances allowing.

My Catskill fishing buddy Gary Dodson has got the big fish bug bad. We went back to Pulaski in late April and I caught a steelhead using a decadent and depraved method called “plugging.” I’m glad to have done it once and feel zero need to do it again.

I’ve had an 11-foot-4 weight switch rod kicking around for a few years. I never knew how to rig it up. In the two-handed rod world, the line weight designation means diddly. It’s all about grains and different tips and all this stuff that I just don’t want to learn.

Since Gary was already down in that rabbit hole I just gave him the rod, a big inexpensive Redington reel and asked him to get the appropriate lines and tips and set it up for me. Which he did, for about $150.

And I got to deploy it on the water precisely once in September before…

My right hip got the Gang Gong from the medical profession.

Yep. By the time this is published, I will have had my new right hip for about a month.

At this rate I’m going to be about 40% after-market parts.

So the entire autumn fishing routine, normally a happy and productive time, was shot to hell. My hip worked just enough to let me know that the kind of aggressive and active fishing I like to do was out of the question.

So apart from fiddling around in a half-hearted way with the fall stockies on the Blackberry in October, I spent the fall and early winter sitting around watching YouTube fish videos and plotting and scheming for all the excellent fishing adventures I will have with my new right hip.