A Mid-Winter Trout

My only fish so far in the new decade, in like four attempts. But I did get to try out the new waterproof camera. I’ve since learned there’s an underwater setting; next time I’ll use it and hope for a less muddy result.

Interstate Angling’s Getting Pricey

We have thousands of miles of fine trout streams right here in New York, and yet many Empire State fly-fishers enjoy visiting the trout waters of neighboring states – the pristine upper Battenkill River in Vermont, the springs creeks of Pennsylvania, the Deerfield in Massachusetts. But those of us looking forward to trips to Connecticut, for the tailwater fishing of the Farmington or the big water and big trout of the Housatonic, will be paying more for the privilege.

Connecticut’s non-resident, full-season fishing license has doubled in cost, from $40 to $80.

Don Butler at Upcountry Sportfishing, the fly shop on the Farmington in Pine Meadow, Conn., said the increase in non-resident (and resident) license fees is cause for concern. Sharp license fee hikes in other places have led to sharp declines in licenses sold, and having fewer licensed anglers hurts business for the tackle industry, he said.

“It’s still a very good value for 80 bucks if you compare it against a golf membership,” Butler said. “That said, I think there’s going to be an effect on us. A little increase would be fine, but double is ridiculous.”

Indeed it is, although Butler makes a good point: even at $80, a Connecticut fishing license is a good deal. After all, admission to the rivers themselves is free. You could pay more than $80 for one round of golf or one day of skiing.
Mike Shafer of Gloversville, N.Y., a Housatonic regular, said the cost is reasonable – provided Connecticut uses the money appropriately.

“Will I pay the price? Yes, because the enjoyment I get from fly fishing far outweighs the cost,” he said. “A season on the Housatonic is well worth the cost of a dinner out. The problem I have is that this money is frequently raided by the state governments for other uses. Whether it is in Wyoming, where I paid $14 a day non-resident this past summer, or New York or Connecticut — dedicate all license fees to the management of the sport, period.”

Connecticut’s license is the most expensive among New York’s neighbors. But before we get indignant, let’s remember that Connecticut anglers who enjoy fishing the Delaware or other New York trout rivers have it almost as bad: A non-resident New York license has jumped from $40 to $70.

A non-resident license in Massachusetts costs $37.50. Vermont charges $41. New Jersey’s out-of-state license costs $34, plus another $20 for a trout stamp. Pennsylvania’s non-resident license costs $52.70, plus $9.70 for a trout stamp.

Why the urge to fish outside New York? After all, the branches of the Delaware offer a fine tailwater experience, and the Beaverkill fishes much like the Housatonic. But many New York anglers live closer to western New England than to the western Catskills. And besides, we tend to enjoy a change of scenery from our local waters.

Still, most of us are watching our spending a little more carefully these days, and state governments in the region may want to be mindful of the possibility of asking too much. These license fees are approaching levels that will convince some anglers to take the stay-cation approach and do their fishing at home.

It’s Possible to Drill Safely, If We Demand It

Something tells me that if I tried to pump 40,000 gallons of diesel fuel and chemicals into the earth, I’d get hit with a whopping fine — and rightly so. Yet that’s exactly what happens at each and every hydro-fracturing natural gas well, and the energy industry wants to erect hundreds, if not thousands, of these things across New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

But it turns out they don’t have to use diesel fuel and dangerous chemicals. There are green alternatives that sharply reduce the risk of contaminating groundwater. There are also ways to prevent accidental spills of fracking fluid, use less water, cut down on methane and CO2 emissions and better treat waste. But the industry will only employ these methods when forced to by the government.

Pro-Publica is out with an excellent story about ways hydro-fracturing for natural gas can be done far more safely. Government needs to step up; here’s how.

Domestic natural gas production could be good for the environment, the economy and national security, but only if it’s done right. Done wrong, it will be bad for all three.

Jack Gartside, 1942-2009

Jack Gartside has died. He was a brilliantly innovative fly designer and great writer who may end up being best remembered for being photographed using a big inflatable giraffe as a float tube on a striper flat. Gartside was dead serious about fishing and fly-tying, but went about his life with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. He was intellectual and irreverent but also kind and gentlemanly. And he invented some dynamite flies: the Gurgler, the Sparrow, the Soft-Hackle Streamer, to name a few of the most famous.

I met Jack a couple of times and thought the world of him. He gave a talk at the Albany, N.Y. Trout Unlimited chapter a few years back and introduced a new pattern, made with the soft feathers from a hen’s backside. Chain-smoking all through his slide show in a hotel meeting room, he called his fly the  Chicken Poop and told us how effective it was and why. There was no reason not to believe every word.

40 Rivers’ Alex Cerveniak

Fly-Fishing: Cerveniak’s move was region’s gain

From The Daily Gazette, Schenectady, N.Y.

Alex Cerveniak of Clifton Park is one of fly-fishing’s top bloggers (40 Rivers to Freedom, at hatchesmagazine.com/blogs/40rivers) and the content director for Hatches magazine, the annually published-on-paper and regularly updated online fly-tying journal, as well as the magazine’s sister Web site, Flyaddicts.com.

Considering how popular blogs, Web sites and magazines are with fly-fishers, those are impressive pos­itions to hold. They’re all the more remarkable when you consider Cerveniak cast his first fly just five years ago.

He was deer hunting in his native Michigan, but bovine tuberculosis had made deer scarce, and he was bored.

“I said, ‘You know what, I’m going to start fly-fishing,’ ” he said. “I’d read that steelhead fishing was good during deer season because everybody is out deer hunting.”

That was in the fall of 2004. By the following January, he had acquired the necessary gear for fly-tying, as well as fly-fishing. “I was all in,” he said. That spring, he was catching trout on flies he tied himself. He had a dozen blue-ribbon trout streams within a half-hour of his home in Gaylord, Mich., including the famed Au Sable, as well as tributaries to lakes Huron and Michigan for steelhead and salmon runs.

“It’s just one of those things where you love it, and it’s all you can think about and it’s all you want to do,” he said.

But Cerveniak also is a family man, with a wife, 11-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son, and family men need incomes. So when the Georgia Pacific particle board factory in northern Michigan closed down three years ago, he reluctantly decided to relocate. His wife, Janet, has a sister, Jamie Radebach, whose husband, Matt, works at the General Electric Co. Global Research Center in Niskayuna.

The Cerveniaks came for a visit that summer, found jobs and an apartment in the Capital Region, and went back home to pack up and move for good. Now, he’s a lab technician at Adirondack Specialty Adhesives in Albany and an envir­onmental science major at Hudson Valley Community College.

“There’s tons of work out here, it’s beautiful, the winters aren’t as long,” he said. “People here have no idea how good they have it, compared to northern Michigan. And [back in northern Michigan] they’ve had two inches of snow on the ground since late September, and they’ll have snow on the ground until mid-May.”

How does he find the fishing in New York? Most of the really good trout fishing involves some driving.

“Once you hit the hour mark, more opportunities arise,” Cer­veniak said. But within minutes of home, in the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers and plenty of lakes, he found highly satisfying fishing for other species.

In Michigan, “I had a lot more cold-water fisheries — more trout, more steelhead, more salmon,” he said. “But the warm-water fishing here is 10 times better than it was back there — the smallmouth and largemouth bass. Other places in the world would consider this world-class smallmouth bass fishing. A lot of days you’ll get into the smaller fish, the 10- to 14-inch fish, that people will get bored with, but there’s nice fish too — you just have to take the trouble to find them.

“Carp fishing has become a little bit of an obsession.”

Naturally, there are steelhead and salmon to be caught three hours to the west of Clifton Park, and Cerveniak has made the trek many times. Also, naturally, he fishes the Battenkill River. In fact, he found some time on a late October Sunday to fish the Battenkill with Geoff Schaacke, who happens to be another fly-fishing blogger from the Capital Region (he’s co-author with Robin Hill of The Angler’s Net at www.theanglersnet.com).

It was pouring rain — a cold, drenching downpour. They floated the Battenkill in a canoe and cast, among other things, a large, shiny, two-hook jointed streamer fly called the Circus Peanut, and caught big, beefy brown trout in weather that would make any sane living thing miserable.

“If you’re going to fish, you’ve got to fish,” Cerveniak said. “You can’t get good at fishing in the wind on nice sunny days. I go to school full time, and I work full time, and my kids are both in sports, and when you get time to fish, you’ve got to fish.

“Hey, the post office still delivers mail in the rain.”

Driller: No Plans for Wells in Catskills

About a week after you read it on The Fly Line, the New York Times reports on Chesapeake Energy’s withdrawal of its plan to draw water from the West Branch of the Delaware River for hydro-fracture natural gas wells.

The Times said the company “will not drill for natural gas within the upstate New York watershed,” as though there was only one watershed in upstate New York. Context suggests the Old Grey Lady means the Delaware, Esopus and Schoharie watersheds, which supply the city with much of its drinking water.

Chesapeake CEO Aubrey McClendon told the paper, “We are not going to develop those leases, and we are not taking any more leases, and I don’t think anybody else in the industry would dare to acquire leases in the New York City watershed.”

Geography mistakes aside, McClendon’s comments appear to signal that the Esopus, Beaverkill, Willowemoc, Schoharie, Neversink and branches of the Delaware, along with their tributaries, will be safe from ruinous withdrawals and contamination by the natural gas industry. That is very good news.

Unfortunately, the rest of New York, not to mention Pennsylvania and West Virginia, isn’t lucky enough to be the source of water for New York City. McClendon made clear it will be drill, baby, drill everywhere else.

McClendon also told the Times that Chesapeake plans to reveal the make-up of the “fracking fluid” that will be used to break up shale a mile underground and free up the gas. Dick Cheney (yes, the same Dick Cheney that will be the guest of honor at the American Museum of Fly Fishing’s annual dinner in Washington, D.C. Nov. 12) got the natural gas industry exempted from disclosing the dangerous chemicals in fracking fluid back in 2005. But now, “The industry is moving quickly to complete disclosure,” McClendon told the Times.

As I’ve written elsewhere, knowing what’s in the fracking fluid is about the same as knowing the caliber of the gun pointing between your eyes.

Gas Driller Drops Plan to Tap West Branch Delaware

Citing public opposition and tight restrictions, Chesapeake Energy has dropped its controversial request to withdraw a million gallons of water per day from New York’s best trout stream, the West Branch of the Delaware River.

“In light of the limitations proposed for the project and the comments provided by various parties, we have decided to withdraw the application and reassess our approach to the situation,” the Charleston, W. Va. company wrote to Mark Klotz, chairman of the Delaware River Basin Commission, in a letter dated Oct. 20.

In September, when the company asked the DRBC to postpone a hearing on the project, it said it hadn’t had time to examine conditions the DRBC wanted to impose – “particularly with respect to the proposed pass-by flow.” The DRBC had planned to require the company to stop withdrawing water any time the West Branch got down to a flow of 250 cubic feet per second at the withdrawal site, about eight miles below Hale Eddy, N.Y.

The water was to have been used for hydro-fracturing, a method of drilling that permits access to what might be 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas trapped thousands of feet underneath Pennsylvania, West Virginia and southern New York.

Hydro-fracturing has been viewed with alarm by fishing advocates, who fear fragile trout streams will be seen as cheap and convenient sources of water. Each gas welll uses as much as 9 million gallons, and some experts predict thousands of such wells could spring up on the Marcellus Shale formation over the coming years. Hundreds of thousands of acres of private land have already been leased by energy companies hoping to drill.

Hydro-fracturing is also controversial because the water it injects into and then withdraws from wells is densely polluted with highly toxic substances. Groundwater contamination and fish kills from spills in streams have been reported in several states.

Only 30 Percent of Streamflow Safe From Gas Drillers

Natural gas drillers with permits to draw water from trout streams would be entitled to continue taking water even in low-water conditions — stopping only when the stream gets down to 30 percent of its average daily or monthly flow, whichever is greater, under new rules proposed by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation.

Described as a “Natural Flow Regime Method,” the proposed regulation is part of an 800-page draft generic environmental impact statement released last week by the DEC in anticipation of thousands of applications for natural gas wells in the southern half of the state.

The hydro-fracturing method of natural gas drilling uses millions of gallons of water for each well. The prospect that trout streams will be seen as cheap and convenient sources has alarmed environmentalists and fishing advocates. One company has already asked permission to withdraw water from the West Branch of the Delaware River, one of the region’s premier trout streams.

The DEC says a separate permit will be required for each water withdrawal, and drillers will be required to submit a “stringent and protective streamflow analysis.”

The Natural Flow Regime Method requires a “passby flow” of 30 percent of the average daily flow or average monthly flow, whichever is greater. On a small stream with an average flow of 50 cubic feet per second, a driller would be entitled to continue withdrawing water until the stream has been reduced to just 15 cubic feet per second, by natural conditions like lack of rainfall and by the withdrawal itself.

Maureen Wren, a spokeswoman for the DEC, said the 30 percent passby flow is based on well-established formulas that have worked in other states.

“We believe that that will ensure that aquatic communities in the stream are protected,” Wren told me in an interview this week.

The leading coldwater conser­vation group is not so sure.

“Trout Unlimited is still in the process of analyzing the water withdrawal component, as well as all of the other aspects of the draft SGEIS. However, at first glance, the proposed Natural Flow Regime Method appears to be an antiquated method by which to set water withdrawal levels — particularly when other states in the region are moving toward a watershed approach to deal with water withdrawals,” said Elizabeth Maclin, TU vice president for Eastern Conservation.

The Marcellus Shale formation, which could contain as much as 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, lies beneath West Virginia, Pennsylvania

and the southern half of New York, from Chautauqua County to the Hud­son River and as far north as I-90.

Other parts of New York could see hydro-fracturing in the future.

“Sedimentary rock formations which may someday be developed by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing exist from the Vermont/Massachusetts border up to the St. Lawrence/Lake Champlain region, west along Lake Ontario to Lake Erie and across the Southern Tier and Finger Lakes regions,” according to the DEC. “Drilling will not occur on state-owned lands in the Adirondack and Catskill Forest Preserves because of the state constitution’s requirement that Forest Preserve lands be kept forever wild and not be leased or sold. In addition, the subsurface geology of the Adirondacks, New York City and Long Island renders drilling for hydrocarbons in those areas unlikely.”

A Must-Read: ‘Tying Catskill-Style Dry Flies’

With each year that goes by, the men and women who more or less invented American fly-fishing in the Catskill Mountains in the early 20^th century fade a little further into the past.

Some of the rivers they fished and wrote about have been buried by reservoirs for half a century. And they flies they invented and perfected — like the phones they used and the cars they drove — have been supplanted by sleeker, more effective models.

But for those of us who love fly-fishing and fly-tying, the stories of the Dettes and the Darbees, the Hendrickson and the Quill Gordon still resonate. We see the black-and-white photos of them at their tying benches or on the stream with their rods, and the connection between what we do and what they did is a tight, straight line. Much has changed from then to now, but the game is the same.

A new book brings the era of the Catskills fly-tiers vividly to life. “Tying Catskill-Style Dry Flies” is a fresh look at the rivers, the fishing, the personalities and the history by Mike Valla of Stony Creek, N.Y.

“I think people that don’t pay attention to this history are missing out on a lot of the enjoyment of the sport,” said Valla, who enjoyed extraordinary access to the figures at the heart of Catskill fly-tying and fishing  through his close relationship with Walt and Winnie Dette. “I think it makes the sport more interesting to know the roots of it.”

In 1969, the 15-year-old Valla took a bus from his hometown of Binghamton to fish the Beaverkill. Winnie Dette, who had sold Valla flies earlier that day, sent Walt – by now already famous – to track Valla down on the river and make sure he didn’t miss the bus home.

“From that time forward,” Valla writes, “I stayed with the Dettes on many occasions, particularly during teenage and college summers. I fondly remember Winnie tucked in her fly-tying cubbie on the right side while Walt tied in his domain to her left. I usually squeezed in between them, intently watching Walt while persistently tugging at Winnie to talk about the famous Catskill fly-tiers.” Valla soaked up the banter in the Dettes’ fly shop, hanging out with luminaries like Art Flick. By the time he finished high school, he knew the Beaverkill  so well he was a little sick of it.

Valla’s book includes a fine survey of the Catskills streams – the Beaverkill River, Willowemoc Creek, Esopus Creek, Neversink River and Schoharie and West Kill creeks. Naturally, there is plenty of ink on Theodore Gordon, Flick, the Dettes and Harry and Elsie Darbee, but there are also entries on less-publicized but important fly-tiers, such as “tall, lean and coppery-skinned” Ray Smith, dean of the Esopus, and Louis Rhead, with his imaginative flies, suspect entomology and bizarre death.

“Tying Catskill-Style Dry Flies” is above all a fly-tying book, and tiers will love learning the details of how the masters plied their craft. Precisely what vises they used, what surgical instruments they used as hackle pliers, what color thread they used (you might be surprised), what they discovered when they dissected Rube Cross’s flies – this stuff is priceless. There are also a number of fascinating, rarely seen photos and documents from the American Museum of Fly Fishing and the Catskill Fly Fishing Center and Museum.

“Tying Catskill-Style Dry Flies” also includes chapters on modern Catskill fly-tiers, whose flies sometimes seem unorthodox to the old-timers – but not to Valla. He loves making the traditional flies, but when he’s out for trout, he uses what works.

“If I’m on the flats on the East Branch of the Delaware, I’m not going to stick a Quill Gordon out there in June or July on a slick, gin-clear flat,” he said. “There’s plenty of times I’ll be on the river just fishing parachutes or Comparaduns.”

“When someone hands me a fly, and I see they’re taking fish and I’m not, I’ll take it,” he said with a laugh. “I’m not stupid.”

Remembering Fran Betters, Sage of the Ausable

Fran Betters, champion of the West Branch of the Ausable in the Adirondack Mountains and inventor of some of the most popular and effective fishing flies, died Sunday.

Betters had been in poor health, and had acknowledged on his Web site that he hoped to “hang on a bit longer in hopes of finding the right person to buy my shop.”

It was Betters who in the 1950s came up with the idea of using one propped-up clump of deer hair as both the wings and legs of a dry fly – a simple, sturdy pattern known as the Haystack that suggested an Isonychia mayfly bobbing on the Ausable’s brawling currents. The same construction using snowshoe hare’s foot fur instead of deer hair became the Usual, a generalist emerger/dun that has caught trout from coast to coast, while the basic structure of the Haystack was tidied up to become the Comparadun and Sparkle Dun – slim, flush-floating flies that catch trout where traditional hackled dry flies won’t.

Betters pretty much considered the West Branch of the Ausable the best trout stream in the world. Advancing age and old injuries from a car accident kept him off the water in recent years, but he could still be found from morning until night cranking out Picket Fins, Ausable Wulffs and other signature patterns at a messy tying station in the middle of his shop.

Fran Betters and Bob Mead at Betters' shop, the Evening Hatch, in 2007.

“No self-respecting fly rodder, on a pilgrimage to the West Branch of the Ausable River, would even think of putting a wadered foot in its storied waters without first stopping in at the Evening Hatch to pay homage to the High Peaks gatekeeper,” said longtime friend and renowned tier of ultra-realistic flies Bob Mead.