CUTBANK Words: Stephen Sautner A WINTER DISPATCH FROM THE GARDEN STATE A 10-foot-wide ribbon of dark water babbled through an otherwise silent snowscape. The creek ran low and clear; most of its f low remained locked up in the drifts around me. For the first quarter mile, I had one sharp pluck on a weighted bugger drifted through a pocket, but nothing else. When I came to a slower, deeper pool with a lazy bubble line moseying into a tailout I stopped and watched. A few early brown stoneflies and midges wandered on the snow along the banks and dark specks drifted in the film. And then, by God, a trout rose. I hunched into stealth mode. The trout rose again, pushing a little water. Decent fish. What had begun as a casual afternoon slinging junk had suddenly gotten serious. I clipped off the streamer and retied with a size-20 Adams. Staying low, I slowly approached the pool and carefully pulled off some line. Just as I was about It snowed again l ast Thursday , adding another five or six inches to the 20 already on the ground. Then by Sunday, the late February sun dusted itself off and icicles began to drip, drip, drip. The thermometer outside read 35 degrees. I convinced myself this was, in fact, almost 40, so I grabbed my gear and headed out. I chose a small, overlooked wild trout stream that straddles the frontier between hardcore New Jersey suburbia and its remnant woodlands. At a dead-end road adjacent to a small county park, I parked and tugged on waders and traversed an enormous pile of snow left behind by the town plow. Someone had snowshoed here recently, so I fol-lowed their tracks into the woods—it beat trudging through untrammeled knee-deep snow. After a while, they merged with a cross-country skier’s trail, which eventually deposited me at a sharp bend in the stream. BELOW Tim Mahoney makes his way up the banks of Big Flat Brook in Sussex County, NJ, on an extremely cold day—below freezing to be exact. “We would fish for about 30 minutes, go back to the car and warm up, then return to fishing for 30 more— the process repeated ad nauseum.” Photo: Rob Yaskovic 0102 THE FLYFISH JOURNAL
The Flyfish Journal Volume 13, Issue 2: Page 102
