[Lard Almighty]

I took a much needed mental health day and decided to try my luck at some wild trout. My first stop was a place I hadn't been to in ages, Bear Swamp Brook in the Ramapo Mountains. This spot is very special to me for two reasons. First, it's the place where I caught my very first trout: a native brook trout that stretched the tape at about 6 inches, although it may as well have been 6 feet at the time. Second, when my uncle passed away several years ago, this is the place where he wanted his ashes scattered. On the day of the service, my family and I walked the road along the river, and saw an insane number of brook trout. Each little pool had five or six of them at least, all catching the bright sun and glowing like Christmas trees. I never saw anything like it before, or since. I like to think it was my uncle's favorite spot giving him a grand send-off.

But I digress. Back to the fishing.

The first pool I fished yielded a miss. After that it was four hours of fishing pools and runs smaller than most people's bathroom sinks, with no luck. After three miles of walking up and down mountains, in the last pool before I reached the car, I finally got a scrappy 6 inch brookie to bite and hold on. That's 45 minutes per inch, or one half mile per inch for those keeping score. Not the easiest or biggest fish I have ever caught, but strangely satisfying.

There was a HUGE stonefly hatch going on, literally thousands of them were carpeting the surface of the Ramapo River. Nothing rising on them; maybe the fish were already stuffed?

On the way back home, I decided to check out what was going on at Peapack Brook. In the first pool there were several fish rising. Another hatch going on, this time midges. On my first cast I got a small fallfish. A few casts later I missed a small trout. After a couple hours I saw a few browns milling around, but didn't get any more hook-ups. With the sun getting low I called it a day.

Tough day fishing to say the least. But at least I wasn't at work.