Upper Delaware River Fly Fishing Report

a nice brown from yesterday. photo from guide Matt Hackett

Delayed Start, Delayed Again

The Rainy weather and high water conditions continue. Over the last 2 days we received substantial rainfall again. This new batch of rainfall was completely different that what hit us last Sunday and Monday but the end result is nearly the same..

As I write this all of our rivers are once again blown out. The day did not start that way. We started a pretty normal day with several trips heading out. By mid day however all of our guides shortened their trips and pulled the boats.

Roscoe and the fly shop were pretty dead due to the rain and Easter. This afternoon Michele and I took a long ride throughout the Upper Delaware for the first time since getting back from Florida. The shots below show the current conditions. These are on the Beaverkill which has been pretty bad all week. Some of the other streams in the area are not so bad. We even found a few smaller off the radar streams to be fishable. One of these even had a few risers.

All of our guided trips for the coming week will go out as scheduled, just not in the water shown below.

Overall the action was pretty good prior to the storms. Despite the sustained high water the bite is on. The last few days the fish have been chasing down streamers pretty good. Our guests have taken some impressive Brown Trout this week. Below are a few from the last 2 days.

Even with the high water the insects are active. Mayflies, Caddisflies and some stoneflies are on the water. The weather has produced some Blue wing olive hatches. These along with the Blue Quills are the main staple right now. Hendricksons and Quill Gordons are on the water but these bigger mayflies are just getting going. These should go well into May this year.

With the current conditions our guests will have lots of good opportunity fishing from our drift boats. Visiting anglers who walk wade will have to wait a bit. I expect it to be a few days without rain for some wadable water to emerge. By mid week confident anglers may be able to creep around in the shallows and in the tailouts of larger pools and eddies. I will keep updating as conditions improve.

If you must get out I would recommend working over some of our smaller streams and mountain brooks for Brook Trout. Many of these smaller streams clean up fast and most every mountain stream in the area has decent brook trout population. Below is an example of guide Luc's handy work.