Fly on the run

I was invited to participate in the Fly On The Run annual fund raiser event again this year. This event is a fund raiser for Lancaster County Career & Technology Center (LCCTC). This is a great school for kids to learn a specific trade. This is a two day event. The evening before the fishing day, there is an awesome meal that is made by the student and hosted by the student. This event allows the students real life experience in the specialties of hosting, pastries, restaurant planning, and lots of other positions. Tonight they served Lobster tail, prime rib,and lots of other great food. The desserts were out of this world! Here was one of the cake pieces. The fish image on top was all hand done with white and regular chocolate. It was on each piece. And it was very delicious.

There is an auction that is of all kinds of donated items.  one of the items was a cake made by the students. Everything on the cake is edible. Here is the item I donated.  It is a wooden 4"x6" wooden fly box.  I put in some of the chain gang nymphs (Hares Ear, Copper John, Stonefly, and two new patterns: Prince and Royal Prince) and my favorite caddis dry fly which works great on the Lititz Run, the Opal Caddis.  I also put in a Stoned Claw Crazy, a new sculpin pattern, and the Wooly Skull. This box raised $150 for future scholarships given to some of the students.

There are browns, brookies, and rainbows in this Lititz Run. This creek is a stream restoration success. It is a spring creek that was a really warm water because of thermal pollution and also suffered a lot of chemical pollution. Donegal Trout Unlimited and others put a lot of time and effort into cleaning it up and is now a first rate stream. The bug life had disappeared but in the last couple years have seen lots of bug life return. There are now several caddis varieties, a cahill hatch, and tricos.

This event is a one fly tournament. It is setup as a competition of teams of four. There are four session times to fish. Two rods are allowed during each session. We had a lot of rain on Monday and Tuesday. This allowed the stream to have a nice amount of water, which was nice because before this there was very little water in the Lititz Run.

I tried a new streamer design (Ice Magic) and did well with it. The wooly skull also did well and brought fish to hand. The new design of chain gang prince nymph also caught fish. I was really happy with how some of these new designs worked today. We had really good fishing for about forty five minutes and then the sun hit the water and it definitely slowed things down. It was bright blue bird skies. The weather was wonderful to be outside and enjoy the friendships of the guys on my team. The lunker award went to a 23.5" brown. There were a couple teams that just knocked em dead. They must have had some beats that had a ton of fish.

The event was well worth attending and was enjoyed by all. Last year they raised over $50,000 for the school and to provide kids with scholarships to further their education.

4/15/2012 fishing report.

I decided to head out to the Conestoga River for the last couple hours of daylight last night. The section I was fishing is more like an average size stream. The water level for this time of year is extremely low. We haven't had a sizable rainfall in a while. I believe we are about two inches of rainfall behind our normal amount. The Conestoga is currently at 200 CFS and is usually about 500 CFS this time of year. We need rain badly here in PA. 

I went to do some exploring. I looked on the map and found some spots I wanted to fish. Well unfortunately, when I got to these spots I found out that they were posted. What a bummer, cause the water looked promising.

I finally got to a spot that wasn't posted. I was fishing with my new crayfish pattern. I have to say, this new pattern didn't disappoint me. It did well and the fish I did catch, hammered the pattern. There were no subtle takes! Look for this pattern on MyFlies.com as soon as i can get photos of it. It is called the "Stoned Claw Crazy".

The only thing that did disappoint me was the fishing location. There was a LOT of dead water, water with no holding spots or it was covered from bank to bank with green moss. I covered a ton of ground between fishable spots. I guess that is one of the things with exploring, you can get find places you will go back again and others that you won't waste your time on again. Each time you go out exploring you hope you hit the jackpot on an excellent fishing spot. Sometimes you win and sometimes you don't.