Oyez! Oyez! Gather Round!

- March 28th, 2014 AD - 

An Announcement is Made, This Day.

Hear ye! Hear ye! Eight o'clock, and all's well! To all good people gathered here in the villages of Connecticut, I bring you greetings from Guilford Town, in the Region of New Haven. Yea, let it be known that the cigar was taken in the gloaming and there were tiny frogs this eve; late by two weeks past and the year afore that, but here at last out in the coppice!

Here ye! Here ye! Spring is here and all's well!

God Save The Queen! And God Bless America!

Tight lines for the season.

TAC

A spring peeper. Surely the greatest of all animals.

It's Wild Trout Time (again)

With the temperature reaching a toasty 35 degrees today I headed for my local river. No bugs were hatching but fish were rising steadily and uniformly throughout the glassy pool. A sure sign that spring is finally upon us.

Perfect wild trout habitat

Trout rose uniformly, this spring day

Recognizing the subtle rises of wild brown trout fresh off the tide, I rigged with American Nymphs and dry caddis, but the fish would have none of it! I sensed that something more traditional was in order. Looking to my trusty Weatley fly box, the answer came to me as it had on so many March days on this particular chalk stream. 

A hackled wet fly. Perfect for wild brown trout, today

Chalk aquifers feed the wild trout of southern Connecticut

I was rewarded with 37 of the most wonderful mix of domestic wild browns and fresh-run sea-trout.  

Another fin perfect wild trout falls for the traditional soft-hackle wet fly. Just last week there were no trout in the river. Where do the wild beauties go in winter?

Anything's possible in March. A wild sea-trout, fresh from the sea

 

March Wild trout will rise through a concrete bridge

As sure as winter turns to spring, it's reassuring - some would say magical - to know that wild trout will be caught with predictable regularity when March comes around, as if they had always been there.

Tight Lines,

Jonny 

Peripheral: Product News

Aside from the occasional review of light tackle or rehydration techniques, we don't go in for product testing and review, much less endorsement.

Cars drove over my TFO Lefty Kreh rod last year, a replacement for the older model I'd shut in the garage door the year before in my rush to the culvert. This time I came clean, explaining to the company that, in all conscience, I'd been a perfect imbecile for leaving it atop the Lezbaru and driving off; that they shouldn't take pity.

TFO just sent me a new one, which means I have had three of their very serviceable and altogether quite likable rods for a total outlay of $150 (give or take postage). This is three good fishing rods - and realistically, there will be more - all for the princely sum of 90 of my superior British Pounds Sterling (that's 30 quid each, or half a tank of petroleum. And no, not the jelly.) The latest of what is truly a TFO Professional "series" was dispatched in record time, arriving today just as the Forsythia shows the first bloom.

As has been my unpleasant experience, if this were an Orvis product, hand crafted on the silky soft thighs of a Vermont milkmaid (in China, at my price point), I would likely have received a lowly percent value of the old model, such is the speed with which Orvis re-brand what is, to the eye of the average non-idiot, the very same product.

And so dear reader we take momentary pause - rightfully fleeting, altogether insignificant - to recognize TFO, a company for which a "100% lifetime warranty" is, in fact, just that.

Peripheral, but not a given, this day.

Carry on.

EJ

Another take on November steelhead

Jonny made this film several months ago, then hid it away when Todd made his. But they're both good, so I've taken the liberty of putting this one up.
 
New York, November 2013 from English Jonny on Vimeo.