Fish Tales
- Thread starter Ripitz
- Start date
Bigger than any trout he’s caught in late November?
raisingarizona
Well-known member
- Joined
- Aug 4, 2020
Arizona bass fishing looks legit. I think I want a boat.
Is that a better fish than my brown (first trout btw)? Yes, but a better story? A fishing trip report is in order. It’s a lengthy report, move along if you don’t want to invest time reading my story. This is as much to memorialize the best day my son and I have had fishing than it is for your reading pleasure.
You all may or may not have seen by now that my son is a freshman at Binghamton U. This fall we had the pleasure of going to Family Weekend. The displeasure was a bs “improper lane change” ticket. As we know, you always plead “not guilty” if you can stomach a trip to local court. Since my son is at Binghamton that’s a trip I could stomach. Hopefully a court date could be combined with meeting up with my son for some fishing. The court date was set for November 19. Later than I’d have preferred, but a Friday. So I planned to hit court on Friday, get a hotel in the Livingston Manor area Friday night, and spend the day fishing for trout with my son Saturday.
Court went ok. Rather than two points, a $150 fine, and a $93 surcharge I was offered the option to take an online class. $200 fee, take the six hour course, ticket thrown out. Six hours sucks, but it will probably get me a discount on my car insurance, so…eh. Court done, I hooked up with my son, we hit Dicks for some supplies, Outback for dinner, then off to the hotel! BTW, wouldn’t have expected it, but this smoked Old Fashioned made with cinnamon pecan bitters…excellent, once the smoke cleared.
On the plus side our lodging for the night was Callicoon Hills Resort. Now, if you’ve been across 17 it appears, at least to me (and I travelled it often back in forth to Geneseo during college), before my son and I got into fishing, that places like Livingston Manor and Roscoe are sleepy hamlets in the middle of nowhere. Well, Callicoon Center, home to Callicoon Hills, is 8 miles from the middle of nowhere. Of course once you get into fishing places like Roscoe and Livingston Manor take on new meaning. Callicoon Hills/Callicoon Center, sleepier than sleepy as it may be, happens to be smack dab in the middle of a plethora of potential fishing objectives.
A word about Callicoon Hills resort. It’s a nice place, albeit hipster central in the middle of nowhere. Upon check in you get your choice from a bucket of cans of chilled wine. First time I’ve seen that. The lodgings are hipster chic cabin-like. Pretty nice restaurant that was packed. A beer garden/breakfast spot with jazzy French Musak playing. Said Muzak was right up Charles and Lolita’s alley I’m sure. Who are Charles and Lolita you ask? Well, they were a couple I met by the fire pit Friday night, come from NYC, met at Bard, Lolita hails from Paris originally, they happen to be shopping for a “place in the country”, as that seems to be the de riguere thing for NYC folks to do these day. Mind you, they don’t fish, ski, hike, or do much that the area seems to offer, but good for them. Yeah, I’m that chatty guy you meet by a fire pit, but I digress…point being, the place was really nice.
With the plus side (Callicoon Hills)…there came a minus, back to that later in November than I’d have liked. The forecast Friday night was chilly, and when we woke up it was colder than expected. Not exactly ideal, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Despite the cold forecast we spent the night before formulating a plan for Saturday. Unbeknownst to me when I booked hotel, the North Branch Callocoon Creek abuts the Callocoon Hills property with convenient direct access past their event barn space, with a long stretch of public access downstream from there. A moonlight perusal showed that it might have promise as stop #1 in the morning. From there we’d head back up to Roscoe and the fabled Junction Pool at the confluence of the Beaverkill and Willowemoc as stop #2. From there it would back to the Hazel Comfort Station on 17 en route to Livingston Manor. The Willowemoc at Hazel was the site of our first trout fishing experience, my son having landed a nice brown in the short 45 minutes we had that day, so this was definitely stop #3. From there the plan was to head up to Lew Beach, if we had time (we didn’t). In addition to planning our spots I spent some time looking up public access rights in those areas, just to make sure we didn’t run afoul of anyone. The DEC Trout locator map is an extremely useful tool.
For those that ski but don’t fish….fishing can require a quiver, more so than skiing. For this day with my son I picked up a travel fly rod setup and some supplies to go with, so we also spent some time Friday night getting familiar with that. The quiver is now four, two spinners, a baitcaster, and a fly rod. All in all, Saturday was shaping up as a fun day!
As previously mentioned, Saturday dawned frostier than expected at 24 degrees, which dampened our enthusiasm to fish the crack of dawn. So a 7am breakfast of shirred eggs with Purple Haze goat cheese and a latte it was, chatting with Charles and Lolita about the properties they’d be looking at that day. From there, before gearing up and packing the car, we decided to walk past the barn and scope out Callicoon Creek. In the light of day it didn’t have the promise the moonlight hinted at the night before. Narrow and shallow, with no fish in site, not good. Not ones to give up easily we drove down the road a mile to see if things opened up more in the public access. They didn’t really, but we still scouted down stream some more. We did find a small deep pool at the foot of a riffle that seemed like exactly the kind of place a trout would love, but it wasn’t worth fishing it was so small. Scratch off stop #1. So back to the hotel it was to gear up, check out, and head to stop # 2.
As one would expect of Trout Town USA, stop #2 looked to have promise.
While my son worked down the Beaverkill a bit I messed with my first fly rod casts. It’s ahhh….gonna take some practice. The Beaverkill was moving fast so it wasn’t too long before we moved upstream to Junction Pool for deeper waters. Junction Pool delivered on that, but it didn’t deliver any fish. Was it too early to think Rip would be right, and we would be skunked on the day? By all recent reports the conditions out there are definitely Not Fatty, nothing seems to be biting right now. Fish or no fish the day has been fun so far, and hope was not lost just yet. We decided to move on to stop #3, the stop my son was most excited about. On the way out of Junction Pool things got less fun. Getting back into the water to cross over to the car my son slipped/tripped on a log. Yup, in the drink, waders swamped, soaked to the bone. It was still around 35 degrees. He was not a happy camper. Given the temps and his layering he was wearing all the clothes he had. Age and wisdom and all…I had enough clothes with me to cover him from base layer to sweatshirt (luckily his jacket had been safe), so after cranking the heat in the car and him getting changed and warmed we got past that snafu, then on to Hazel Comfort and the Willowemoc at stop #3.
The Hazel Comfort Station on Rt. 17 is a pretty cool spot. A DEC designated special trout fishing area, with the convenience of being at a rest stop. Despite the convenience of it, the two times we’ve been there this fall we haven’t seen another soul fishing. Perhaps it’s a madhouse other times, we’ll find out next spring. The creek in this area has a lot of variety, with shallower areas of river rock, some sandy stretches, and numerous deep pools next to sheer rock faces, with rocky ledges in the water. We started in the area we first found success, a sandy bottom with a deep pool next to a 12 foot rock face with a rope swing. Nothing biting there we decided to move upstream a bit. After a bit, throwing a few casts here or there, nothing biting, things weren’t looking great, as Rip suspected would be the case. But there….in the distance just a bit further upstream….it had a different look, glassy, calm. Hadn’t seen that anywhere yet, so we’d push on to check it out before exploring the areas downstream of the rest area.
The effort paid off. Wide, deep, promising. My son started fishing the deepest pool and got a few nibbles. Me, I could see the spot immediately, a deep channel running along a rock shelf. Casting downstream, pulling a fly-spinner combination back up the channel, netted a quick hit and scored me my first ever trout.
It’s not a Jason trout, but given the time of year, temps, and recent reports in the area I’ll take it! We continued to work this area for most of the afternoon. I had another on that got loose, we both had several nibbles, but we didn’t land anything else….but we weren’t skunked completely on the day! This will be one of our favorite trout fishing spots moving forward. Where my son is standing there’s a series of ledges starting at 2’ deep, stepping down to 4’, stepping down yet again to ???, and the channel I worked for the brown. The pool he’s fishing past the channel is wide and deep. Hard to imagine a better spot for trout.
As the light waned we worked our way downstream of the rest stop to scout spots for future trips. All in all it was a really fun day, and as much as I enjoyed the fishing it was quality time with my son that made the day.
Attachments
Last edited:
