We finally made it to the trophy section of the Upper Connecticut over the weekend of August 2nd. It rained most of the time and the with the river at flood stage on the Monday it was essentially unfishable. This picture shows the pool right below the Carr Ridge Road bridge. This has to be the most over fished stretch of the river. We had a great weekend and caught rainbows, brookies and some salmon. Ethan did much better than me and battled a big landlocked salmon for twenty minutes. After fighting the monster all over the river it bore down and glued itself to the bottom where it eventually worked it's way loose.

Oscar at Pearl Lake

Oscar decided to take a break from swimming in favor of a boat ride. I fished Pearl Lake for hours with some results. I lost two big trout to a deep trolled wooly bugger. I took a couple of perch on a gray ghost and a nice rainbow to a mayfly. As you can see from this video the trout were rising all over. I couldn't figure it out what they were rising for but I'm not complaining.

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We fished Archery Pond in Hookset and caught some smallish brookies and some hefty rainbows ... I caught the smallish brookies and Ethan got the hefty rainbows. The fishing really heated up when the sun started to fade and the mayflies drifted down from the trees and flitted across the surface to lay their eggs. The trout were going wild and we simply cast mayfly patterns toward the real flies.

We had no luck in the rivers. We tried the Swift, Saco and the Pemi without any success. We caught a few brookies at Sky pond. A sink tip line was essential although I bet you could catch them on the surface in the evening. The trout hit a chartreuse wooly bugger and an olive hares tail nymph. We saw some surface activity but nothing to write home about.

Sky Pond is close to a perfect spot to fish. The pond is isolated, lined with trees with no roads within earshot. There are herons and hawks overhead and the loudest noise comes from the resident beaver.

We had some luck at Profile. The best fish was this 14" brookie caught on a woolly bugger. We did see an 18 incher come out of the lake.


People who don't go fishing are missing out on some pretty impressive scenery. Eventually the clouds rolled through the notch and we fished until dusk in the mist under a thick blanket of low cloud.

Nissitissit revisited

We took another crack at the Niss. This time we fished above the Prescott Street bridge. The river recently had a hefty canoe stocking of browns and rainbows. This method introduces fish all along the river rather than a simple mass dumping into a couple of pools. We made our way downstream and eventually spotted some trout rising. I switched from a weighted nymph to a big elk hair caddis and immediately got a hit which I promptly missed by a country mile. I eventually lost the elk hair and decided to go with a royal wulff which produced the results below.

Lamprey River April 26th 2008

Ethan had some success today. He caught a 12 inch brookie and a 16 inch rainbow using a double nymph rig (copper john and prince) with a strike indicator. I broke my personal skunking record after missing a number of decent hits.

Lamprey sucker action!

Ethan caught this hefy sucker on woolly bugger. If you ever hook a sucker it will put up a heck of a fight. It took 20 minutes to land this bruiser after it dragged him all over the river.
If you would like to read an article about the gentle art of spearing suckers you can click on this link. The article is from the New York Times in 1890.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9904EED71539E033A25750C2A9629C94619ED7CF&oref=slogin

Something fishy about the Nissitissit.

The lad convinced me to schlepp to the Nissitissit River in Pepperell, Mass for the second time in three days. On the first trip we visited the "Evening Sun Fly Shop" which is an excellent place. The proprietor, Charles (Charlie) Shadan set us up with some fine new wading boots, pointed us in the right direction and gave us some solid advice on how and where to catch some of the recently stocked trout. The weather was perfect, the river was extremely pleasant and loaded with insect activity. We chatted with a number of friendly and informative local fishermen who all raved about the river, the Evening Sun, Charlie, and the joys of catching the trout that were plain to see in certain spots.
The only problem was that we could not figure out how to catch a fish and we didn't meet or see anyone else catch anything. We tried almost every trick in the book (we held off on dynamite) and got skunked twice in a row. It seems like the river has taken a bit of an early season pounding and the fish have decided to go on hunger strike. I am pretty sure that this river will produce when the hoards have left. The Nissitissit is a very nice river, we'll be back and we will figure out how to pronounce the name and how to pry a trout from it.