On Saturday my friend and fellow Trout
Unlimited member Christopher and I went to the Pequest River for some
fly fishing. The river is in north Jersey and starts just south of
Newton in Sussex County. It flows south and eventually flows into the
Delaware River.
There are a lot of stretches to fish but
I have never fished this river before. While Christopher has fished it
before, he never fished right at the Pequest Hatchery. The hatchery is
where more
than 600,000 brook, brown and rainbow trout are raised each
year for stocking the public waters
of New Jersey. There is a water discharge that flows out of the hatchery
and into the Pequest river. In the winter trout like this area as this
water is warmer the the rest of the river.
There was not
enough room by the discharge so we fished just down stream from it. I
used a lot of flies with no success. Although I missed a couple of fish.
I used a stone-fly nymph, a
Walt's Worm, a phesant tail nymph and a San Juan worm type fly made with
a rubber srtrand from a Koosh Ball. All came up empty.
After a couple of hours I crossed the
river and found a nice pocket of slower moving water. I noticed there
was a big rainbow and a couple a smaller browns hanging around the pool.
I tied on a Brassie and starting fishing the pool. Finally I hooked a
fish. A nice little brown trout. This turned out to be my only fish for
the day but it was also my first, of hopefully many, fish of 2013.
Christopher also did good. He caught a
nice rainbow and also caught a brown that didn't quite make it to the
net. But we counted it.
