Catching and kvetching in the Catskills

I recently returned from a week’s vacation at the ancestral manor in the Catskill village of Phoenicia.

Few things are as tedious as kvetching about the weather, but kvetch I must.

During my week off the weather went from a good impression of the Northeast in late September to Las Vegas in August.

The first day dawned clear and positively chilly at 55 degrees. I went to a nearby stretch of Woodland Valley Creek where I had unfinished business in the form of a brown trout I hooked last year and failed to bring to the net. In Tangled Lines parlance, this is called a “compassionate release.”

It’s a tricky bit of stream that comes down in riffles and pockets and empties into a wide basin hemmed in by a modest cliff on the river right side and a couple of boulders on my side.

You can stand on the boulders and scare everything, or you can creep around and crouch behind the boulders, peering over them in the vain hope of seeing what you’re doing.

After conventional tactics failed, I rigged up two heavy nymphs, one drab and one sparkly, on a 10 foot Tenkara rod.

The length of the rod gave me barely enough leverage to keep the line tight while perched behind my boulder.

The third time through something tugged at the other end. I thought it was a rock at first but then it moved around.

Fish on!

(I never say “fish on!”)

Patrick L. Sullivan

At this moment the Zen simplicity of the fixed-line rod went out the window as I was confronted with a) keeping the fish hooked while b) getting upright from a baseball catcher’s crouch and savoring the resulting back pain while c) scrambling around the boulder in order to d) step into the deceptively deep hole, almost falling face-first into the water.

Somehow I kept this 15 inch or so brown trout on until the very last moment, when it came unbuttoned but e) hung there in the soft water for a split second, just long enough for me to slide the net under it.

The brown took the sparkly nymph, in case you were wondering.

My main fishing buddy Gary Dodson took the wheel the next day for an extended tour of the Beaverkill watershed, with a pit stop beforehand to play with wild rainbows in a small brook near the Pepacton reservoir.

Along the way we stopped in Livingstone Manor at Dette’s fly shop, which is halfway between a retail business and a shrine. I bought some isonychia patterns I didn’t need for the good of the house.

And we visited another fly tyer, Quinn Still-Zinsel of Quinn’s Fly Box (see his shop on Etsy).

Of course this made me think of the Bob Dylan song “The Mighty Quinn.” Instant earworm.

Patrick L. Sullivan

We hit a lovely stretch adjacent to the state campground on the Beaverkill, where I was pleasantly surprised by a couple of decent-sized brown trout that grabbed my Chubby Chernobyl in lieu of the nymphs and wet flies I had tied on a dropper.

This is why I prefer a dry-dropper rig, where the big bushy and highly visible dry fly serves as an indicator, to indicator rigs.

Indicators don’t have hooks in them.

My nomadic attorney Thos. showed up the next day, and we investigated a little blue line. I caught wild brookies and browns, half a dozen of each, and all on a size 10 Parachute Adams that was subsequently retired to the Chewed-Up Fly Hall of Fame. The white post was completely gone, and most of the tail. Makes me wonder just how picky these fish are, anyway.

Then it got hot.

Way up in my valley, it’s usually five to 10 degrees cooler than it is down in the cities of the plain.

Well, on the second day of the heat wave it was 102 in the shade. That means it was worse down below. I don’t know for sure because I didn’t go anywhere.

Instead I read Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels and hydrated.

There were two smallmouth attempts, a stupid and futile effort at dawn at Chimney Hole on the Esopus, and an afternoon assault on the Schoharie in Prattsville.

Patrick L. Sullivan

Just as the 2025 Colorado Rockies occasionally win a ballgame, Thos. outfished both Gary and yours truly on the Schoharie. The final score was one smallmouth to two compassionate releases to zilch, in the order specified above.

Long-time readers will want to know about the Bad Cinema lineup over this vacation. At the ancestral manor we are unafflicted by internet or cell phone signal, so we must watch DVDs.

We watched episodes of the 1941 Republic Pictures serial “The Drums of Fu Manchu,” as an appetizer before the main events, which were:

“Shatter,” a 1974 epic about an international assassin trying to make sense of Peter Cushing’s wind-swept hair; “The Big Bird Cage,” a 1972 women in prison flick that is thoroughly appalling in every possible way; “The Legend of Hell House” (1973) with Roddy McDowell pursing his lips and a revealing visual essay on the state of British dentistry; and “The Devil Rides Out,” a 1967 devil movie with Christopher Lee as the hero for a change.