Trout Power on the West canada Creek, and Soggy Waders

Trout power… “Helping a community come together to support themselves and the West Canada Creek. Trout Power is an initiative to protect and preserve the West Canada Creek.” Taken from trout power.blogspot.com
　
    The majority of my fishing when I was a kid was either with my Grandfather on my Fathers side, or by myself, or myself and a couple friends. That’s not to say that my Father did not take me fishing, he did, but it was not that often. He worked a lot. A lot. I can remember him having 4 jobs at one point, plus there was always a vehicle to work on or house repairs. So for him to break away and find the time to go fishing with his kids was a rare occasion.
    Life moves on, and before you know it, we’re all older, things are different. Families, jobs, the curves life throws at you, they all cause a change in priorities, and all of a sudden, you realize one day that your doing a lot more fishing with your brothers and your father than you ever did before. That’s the realization I came to last year while on the West Canada Creek for the first “Trout Power” tournament and creel study.
    I don’t even remember exactly when I found out about it, but I do remember that I called my Dad almost immediately and told him about it, that we should sign up as it was for two person teams. The day registration began I was online and had us signed up, and the same week my Father had a camp site booked at the West Canada KOA , right on the river. I was set. Well, I wasn’t set, but I was ready!
    Now, the Tournament/creel study was being headed up by a guy I went to catholic grade school with a long, long time ago, who also happens to be a huge fly fisherman. When I say fly fisherman, that isn’t quite right. Enthusiast, probably closer to accurate. He owns a business, JP Ross Fly Rods, where he pours his passion for wild Trout and the Adirondacks into custom fly rods he builds by hand. He started Trout Power to study the West Canada Creek, figure out what is going on with the river, with the fish populations, and how the daily changing water flows controlled by the power company are affecting it all. JP hopes with the studies that it can have a wild self sustaining Trout population within twelve years if managed properly. He also knows that with such a valuable resource as the West Canada Creek that local towns and economies can benefit too. He’s living the fly fisherman’s dream the way I see it.
    I don’t fly fish. It’s not that I don’t want to, but I’ve never paid more than $35 for a fishing rod, and parting with serious cash for fly fishing gear just makes my nerves twitch every time I consider it. And I consider it just about every day. So it seemed to me that this could be quite the adventure. It was open to all forms of fishing, not just fly fishing. Hell, the rules stated, if you could possibly noodle for trout, have at it, just share your secrets with the rest of us! The point was to catch fish, measure them, take their picture, record the place on the river where you caught it, the conditions, and release the fish back to the river. Sounded great to me, but I wanted to learn to fly fish, so my mind was made up. I would not take my spinning gear.
    I had bought two very cheap fly rods early that spring, and my wife had found me some old fishing gear at a garage sale, which, to my pleasure, included a fly reel! I knew nothing about matching fly gear up to make it work, and knew even less about the garage sale reel. I had a very cheap 9ft 5wt rod and a garage sale find reel, no backing, and a 9ft, unknown leader, and some store bought flies. I snagged the lawn in front of my house a few times and managed to get the fly to go about 30 ft with not too much slack out as I saw it. Good enough, lets do this!
    My father and I took a ride to scout out a few spots on the West Canada a couple weeks prior, new spots to us, but spots that about a million others knew already. I didn’t take my fly rod, but seeing the fish rising to bugs, I managed to tie a fly onto my 4lb test fluorocarbon line on my ultra light rod, and with the weight of a slip float, I managed to get it out there, and, low and behold… I hooked a beautiful little stocky. A 9” Brown Trout, and that was that. The river was beautiful, the water was wet, and I caught a trout with a fly that wasn’t even cast on a fly rod…How hard could it really be!? After releasing the fish, I was ready, ready, ready for Trout Power weekend!
    Normally I’m home from my week of traveling for work sometime early in the afternoon on Fridays, but, already impatient for the day to end so I could get up to the camp site, Mr. Murphy showed up, and instead of being done early that particular Friday, I ended up climbing down a tower an hour and a half from home about the time I should have been pulling out of the shop parking lot. Impatient doesn’t describe the mood I was in. So at about 5:30 I found myself kicking up gravel behind my truck and squealing rubber as I hit the pavement with the bed loaded down with a tent, cooler, fishing gear, and fire wood. The radio was cranked, I felt like I was 18 again, and I found myself exceeding the speed limit several times. But I had a good excuse if I were to get pulled over. “Sorry officer, I’m going fishing with my Dad for the entire weekend.” Who could write a ticket with a reason like that!?
    After skidding into the camp site a throwing up the tent, My Father and I walked across the road to the kick off dinner. A silent auction was filled with all kinds of great stuff, from art work to fly fishing gear and gift certificates. It was a good thing I was broke, or I would have done my best to come home with a few more things than I had left with! We checked it all out, grabbed some food and a couple beers, and found two open seats at a table with four guys talking about past fly fishing trips. They all seemed to be good friends, the proverbial fisherman telling old stories they had told most likely over and over again. I specifically remember a story about an expensive rod getting slammed in a truck door on a trip a long way from home, followed by a couple more stories of broken and lost fishing rods of “X” amounts of value. Ouch. But what struck me was the knowledge and experience these guys had not just fly fishing, but traveling around and fishing all kinds of different places, lots of trout fishing. It was here that I began to see how dedicated fly fishermen are, especially to Trout. Heck, I considered myself a pretty big fisherman. That summer I had been fishing at least three nights a week and every weekend, as well as my growing up fishing for Small and Large Mouth Bass, Pike, Walleye, Bullhead, Rainbow and Brown Trout all over the state. Not to mention any chance I had to fish anywhere I was while I was younger and living down south. Down there I have good memories of Catfish, Alligator Gar, and Striped Bass in Texas, and Red Drum and Flounder, along with Large Mouths and Catfish in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia. I’ve even had the chance to hook a Pike in Canada once. But I just cast lures to water, and what ever was in it, maybe I caught it. These guys at our table, and most of the kick off party’s attendants, they were a whole different breed. They, for the most part were fly fishermen and women, with a couple exceptions, and I began to realize how out of place I was. (I was a little jealous to be sure).
    That night my father and I cast our lines a few times in the last light on the bank of our camp site, and Dad was able to catch a small Brown, maybe seven inches, on a rubber meal worm before the darkness took over. Shortly after that, as we set up our cots, he realized he had forgotten his sleeping bag. It was pretty darn funny to wake up the next morning and look over to see him buried under all the clothes from his bag that he had brought for the weekend. We took off in his car up the road for our first fishing spot after a quick breakfast at a local pastry shop, Sweetie Pies in Poland on Route 8 (If Trout weren’t on the brain, I could have sat there all morning and eaten until I was in a pastry coma, it was that good). More stories heard from Trout Power participants at breakfast were all I needed to become impatient, it was time to go!
    At this point I would like to tell you that the first day was just fish after fish for me. I really would. But, remember, I don’t fly fish? Remember my cheap rod and garage sale reel, and unknown line? My lack of any experience with it all? Well, I found the learning curve was pretty wide of a curve for me. I kept my distance from other fisherman, but I kept my eyes on them too as I passed by pushing my way through the under brush and trees on the rivers edge while tangling the gear up in branches over head several times at our first spot. They made it look so easy. I didn’t see that many fish being caught, but to watch the casting was the perfect example of a physical art form. What took them possibly two swings of the fly rod to get the fly out forty feet seemed to take me five or six, with a sloppy touch down and to much slack between me and the fly. When I did get a strike, I just couldn’t seem to set the hook. I watched a couple fisherman down river bring in a couple fish, and they seemed to just lift the rod, opposed to my jerking the rod up and back like my spinning rod, so I thought, maybe I was trying to set the hook to hard, and ripping it away from the fish to early. But that didn’t seem to make a difference, and for the first day I must have missed nine or ten fish. I was slightly frustrated, but just being on the river and seeing fish rise to my fly at all made me smile, and to look up or down river and see my Father wading waist deep with a fishing rod in his hand made me happy.
    We left that spot and drove to a couple others, returning to that one again later that day. My Father had caught one so far, which was cool. We weren’t big dedicated Trout fisherman, just a father and son sharing time on the water, making up for lost time in the past. It was a good day. What I did manage to do however was fall backwards, right on my butt, in front of a professional wild life photographer (who did not snap a picture of me smiling back at him and the other gentlemen on the bank as my waders filled with cold river water). My father caught one more at the camp site that evening in the last light again, swearing it was the same one he caught the night before. It must have had the same smile.
    The next morning, with a dry spare pare of waders borrowed from my Dad (notice, he had no sleeping bag, but two pair of waders… a dedicated fisherman if ever there was one) we set out again, this time to a couple places we hadn’t been to the day before. It was another beautiful day on the West Canada Creek. Besides all the Trout Power participants on the water, it seemed like drones of canoes and kayaks floated by, at one point a canoe with four young boys floated by, hooting and hollering about the huge Trout one of them had just caught up stream around the bend. I had been trying all day with no luck, my Father no better, so I just had to ask, “What did you catch it on?” The boy held up an enormous Phoebe, basically a shiny, heavy piece of steel that spun and fluttered like a bait fish. And there I was, fumbling with the fly rod. I shook my head and replied “Cool!”, but in my mind I was hoping to see the canoe flip or something as it passed under the bridge down stream, and the boy loose his precious shiny metal thing to the river bottom (a particular shiny metal thing that I had several sizes and colors of in my tackle box at home!). At one more spot, later that day, I was wading across a calm pool, making my way to what I thought looked like a good set of riffles at the tail out of another, when the river bottom disappeared, and I found my self trying to swim up stream against the current, my fly rod clenched in my teeth, a second pair of waders filled with cold river water, and my Dad watching from upstream with this half concerned , half puzzled, and slightly amused look on his face. While walking the trail back to the car, the squishing and sloshing noises from my waders just made me smile and shake my head the entire way back.
    My Father caught three fish, one Friday night, and two during the Trout Power tournament. I caught nothing, got a little better at casting the fly rod, learned from our neighbors at the camp ground who were out of state participants in the tournament that my garage sale reel was possibly a left handed, and that it meant it was mounted wrong on my rod and the line was coming out of it in the wrong place. And finally, I fell in twice. All in all, it was one of my better fishing outings of 2012. It’s not that there were no fish in the West Canada that weekend, as a matter of fact, 624 fish in all were caught by the Trout Power participants, the winning team caught 97 of the 624 by them selves! I met some really cool people, was a part of the first Trout Power creel study and tournament, and got to spend an entire weekend with my father. Trout Power is already doing good things for the West Canada Creek. Trophy fish have been purchased to add to the stocking of the West Canada, as well as temperature sensors that will be deployed this season to see what the daily pulsing to make power by the power company does to the temps of the pools all because of the Trout Power tournament and creel study.
    I have since caught two fish on the fly rod, the reel right or wrong. The first was a Fall Fish, on the Oriskany Creek behind my house, the goliath must have been at least, four inches, and a Large Mouth, down at my family farm fishing spot. Learning to fly fish is probably my biggest goal right now with anything that has to do with fishing. That being said,this year we’re looking forward to Trout Power once again, and I’ve been tying jigs all winter. Jigs that look a whole lot like a fly called a Wollybugger, but these won’t be served up on the end of a fly line from me, no sir. This year, I plan on sticking with my trusty Ultra Light spinning gear. Yep. And if I don’t catch a single fish this time around… Well, as long as I fall in two or three times, I’ll still have good stories.