Fishin' Missions: Road Trip to PA - Learning new tricks of the trade

After a roughly 29 hour drive east, I am now here in Central Pennsylvania in the town of Spruce Creek where I will be for April and the beginning of May. I am guiding here on many of our company's sections of rivers (or 'Cricks') including Spruce, Penns, Fishing, Yellow and the Little Juniata. I am excited to be here and hoping this weather will change for the better so more people are ready to go fishing. All of the water I have seen so far here is amazing and very different than what I have grown accustomed to fishing. While in CO, I rarely fish private stretches of water, outside of guiding, while here it seems public access points are much more scarce. I now know I have taken the abundance of river access for granted in CO where one can easily find great public fishing water nearby.

Here the water laws are a bit of a hybrid from what I have found in Colorado and in Montana. In MT, you can drop into ANY river or stream at a public crossing, usually a bridge, and fish as far as your feet can carry you, so long as you stay below the high water mark. In CO, landowners actually own the riverbed, so as long as you can float through the property and stay off rocks, debris, etc, you are using a public resource. Here in PA, the river must have been deemed commercially navigable in a court ruling for it to become a public river. This is achieved usually by proving it was once used to transport logs or other goods for sale at one point in history. Once it is designated public, the same rules as in Montana apply, stay below the high water mark. I am learning which rivers are private, public, or mixed as I get settled here.

With the myriad of new rules to absorb, I am also spending much time at the vise tying up patterns to get me through the spring and summer. I am ready for the cold, rainy-snow to pass and turn on the epic hatches of Grannoms (the great caddis flies here in PA), Olive and Black Caddis as well as some black stone flies.

Here are a few pictures of some of my first fish while here in PA:

The first PA brown I fooled on the Little Juniata - BWO Emerger nymph