I live in central Pennsylvania, and that means I am surrounded by fantastic trout streams, spring fed, gurgling up from the ground. You can travel to Spring, Creek, Spruce Creek, or the Little Juniata and see out of state plates from all over the country. We are a bona fide destination for angling. I routinely show up at waters and see a Mercedes, or BMW, or even a Bentley parked there to fish. A Cadillac Escalade is sometimes the poorest guy on the water, until I show up. I like to make a big production, catch big trout when no one else is having success, and then leave in my old pickup truck. I need to start by explaining a few things.
First, I grew up fishing narrow cricks. A crick is often mistaken for a creek. To many, this is just an accent issue, with people in my neck of rural Pennsylvania mispronouncing the word. While the part of me who appreciated linguistics agrees with that evaluation, the part of me that catches trout does not. Here is how I differentiate a creek from a crick. You can walk in a creek, and you can cast into it. It’s a babbling brook, and you can take a fly rod and make majestic casts that kiss the water after a perfect presentation. You stand there and hear Robert Redford narrating as you see Brad Pitt making things look easy. Or Brad Pitt’s casting double. A casting double is like a stunt double, but not as well compensated, I suspect.
A crick is narrow, you can’t wade in it. You ain’t casting into a crick. The canopy of brush and trees is too thick. In my childhood, you would hear rumors of massive trout that would be cleaned and the stomach contained whole frogs, or even a mouse. This was way back in the 1900s, when my mother would send me out to catch fish to eat for supper. We would cut wine corks into little buts that looked like a Tylenol capsule—the same shape as the food fed to trout in the hatchery before they were transported to the local waters as stocked trout for the beginning of trout season. Some stocked fish lived and went wild, and found their way from stocked rivers into the cricks. Native brook trout were in those cricks too. A crick that was producing well offered a great opportunity for a kid to save some money by wading into thorns and thickets along the stream to claim lures that people lost by thinking they could cast into the tiny openings in the dense cover. Jointed minnows, spinners, you name it, you could find it! So, and this will be a surprise to many, us local anglers to those small cricks developed a better way to catch trout. Brace yourself, if you are a purist. No, really, sit down if you are reading this as a fly swishing purists. We used live bait on a fly road.
It was impossible to cast, so to avoid a tangled mess of 4 pound test in a spinning reel, we would use a fly road and just drift bait a short distance. A couple drifts into each hole, working the crick slowly, so as to be quiet. It was rare that we worried about casting a shadow, in those brush choked streams. Rattlesnakes were a bigger worry. Fishing boots and snake boots are synonymous on a crick, and I wear a pair of snake boots made by Russell Moccasin when I fish cricks these days. A live minnow jig worked great, but some guys used salted minnows, wax worms, or even red worms. The line rarely was out of the reel, just tippet and leader! Let it out, bring it in. Repeat. Next hole. Sure, we had spinning reels on a cheap rod for catching stocked trout or bass, but for chasing crick trout it was all live bait on a fly rod. Fast forward almost four decades, and you can see me on a famous Pennsylvania trout stream. What do I do? I go to the places that are catch and release only, but allow all tackle. Yup, I go in there and begin with the biggest fly I can find, big as a damn moth if I can have one. I once had a huge saltwater fly that I used. I start slapping the water with that beast, while all the luxury car boys and girls are watching. Then, I surreptitiously remove said fly, and go for my vest pocket where I have a few crayfish. Sure, a live minnow might work better, but it takes longer string up the jig. I let that crayfish tail drift and BAM! I carefully produce a huge trout, making sure all my colleagues on the water see it. Back in the water goes the trout, and the big fly goes back on. I start beating the water again, like it owes me money, and then I change it out again. I might have a red worm or two with me as well, or even a few kernels of corn. I switch it up, because I sometimes catch the same trout twice! It may be a stream that allows all tackle, but the guys looking to eat trout never go to those waters. It is just the purists, some that even refuse a plug or a streamer to enter their list of gear.
Now, you may ask how long I do this? How many do I catch? I do it until everyone around me is slapping the water with the biggest fly in the arsenal, and then I go home.
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