The Hurry Up Offense

     Hurry up and relax.  Go - quick - get out there!  Plan accordingly and pace yourself!  Get a leg into your waders- good enough, drag the other!  Grab the rod, throw the chest pack on, move, move, move...  Alright, time's up.  Thank you for playing!  For all of the glorious "after work" blog posts that I've entered this year, I think this marks the last of that breed, for 2012.  Frankly, there's not enough sunlight left, and Sunday, November 4th is going to seal that deal.

      So, for at least tonight, after work, I did manage to stop in at the Croton, with not a lot of time to spare.  I armed myself with the Sage and went dry-droppin' with the same rig that I left off with on the Beaverkill.  That was actually not the right proportions--you shouldn't have a 30" dropper nymph on a small stream--but again, I didn't have a lot of time & I instead chose to flail around the incorrect setup anyway rather than waste daylight to re-rig properly.

     For the record, I've never had an outing with so much dry fly action in my life.  Now, fish would be nice to go along with that, but how much can you complain.  I'll be darned, it seemed as if any fish-worthy cast that I made, a trout came up and slapped the #8 stimulator.  Fish, after fish, after fish--slap, slap, slap, with only one actual taker, but I lost that fish.  A constant barrage of refusals and short-strikes.  In fact, the fish were so busy bullying the stimulator, I only had two legitimate (registered) takes on my #16 BH Pheasant Tail dropper.  And I missed both of those hooksets--saw the flash and felt the thump of the fish but couldn't bury the hook.  Why?  Too much slack because of too much dropper length.  Which I knew would happen when I took my rod out of the car.

     Why did the fish care so much about the stimulator?  I literally believe it pissed them off enough to the extent that it distracted them from eating the nymph.  That's going to be a riddle to me for quite some time.  Kind of like why do we drive on a parkway, and park in the driveway...

     In the meantime, I was in probably the healthiest hatch of small BWOs that I've seen all year.  Several anglers were giving them a shot, but no rises, and no takers.  In unusual fashion, several fisherman were blanked on the river tonight. 

     My patience ran out. So you all know what happens next.

     That streamer isn't 24-hours old yet, but it saved me.

   Overall, I enjoyed tonight.  I wish the clock wasn't ticking quite so loudly as I tried to beat the sunset, but it's the reality of late October.  Certainly, all that topwater action took me by surprise but I'm continuing to learn the dry-dropper way of life.  I think a slight downsizing of the dry and reigning in of the dropper(s) would have made all the difference tonight.  If it were only a Saturday morning at sunrise....