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Angling for Trout in Vermont
Regional Fishing, United States Fishing Articles, Vermont Fishing Articles | Vermont theangler PM
Two kinds of things become intensely colorful in central Vermont at the end of September — tree leaves and trout.
If fall foliage season is a time of apparent dying, with just the hope of renewal in spring, it is the season of new life in the brooks and rivers that come down from the Green Mountains. Fall marks the beginning of spawning behavior for native brook trout and the feral brown trout of the Ottauquechee and White River drainages and the west-flowing rivers that run to Lake Champlain.
The trout are always colorful, both the purple-spotted brown trout and the red-spotted brook trout. They become almost incandescent as they approach the act of procreation. The intense colors make them more attractive to each other on the spawning grounds and more beautiful to catch-and-release anglers who can hold one for a moment and admire it. They still have funny faces, but they are gorgeous in fall.
Vermont’s trout fishing, on the right day and in the right place, can equal most places in North America. The difference between Vermont’s angling and what you will find in the West is pretty simple: It’s more consistent out West, particularly in the slow spring creeks and the tail water rivers below the big dams where water temperature and flow are constant.
In Vermont, the old philosopher Heraclitus is right: “You could not step twice into the same rivers.” Flows change with every local summer thunderstorm or drenching fall rain, days of heat or cold move fish into the spring-fed sections where the water temperature is more desirable. In fall, most aquatic insects stop hatching, defeating the unprepared artificial-fly angler. The grasshoppers sit tight, the flying ants aren’t airborne. But something is always all right, somewhere. What you need is local knowledge and real-time information. This makes it more of a challenge, and more fun, more quirkily exciting than going to a Montana spring creek where the fish are all big and the same fly species hatch day after day.Even to the very end of the Vermont trout season on the last Sunday in October if the weather is decent — two very interesting things start to happen for the angler, one on the big rivers like the White, another on the branches and small creeks. A wet, cool summer has kept even the smallest streams running cold, and the big rivers that usually get too warm are just about always in excellent shape.
In the smaller headwaters, things get completely out of hand. Creeks that hold mostly 6- to 10-inch resident brook trout are suddenly hosts to 16- to 24-inch brown trout looking for a place to set up light housekeeping in early November. It takes nerves of graphite fiber to not strike too fast and too hard when one of the big trout rises after an hour of fishing to tiddlers. And while hatches of flies are slowing down and frosts have stilled most of the grasshoppers and crickets (which can be imitated with large flies, easily visible to the fish and the angler), both brook and brown trout get aggressive and territorial and will hit large streamer flies fished deep near the spawning beds. You simply cannot tell what is going to happen next, and that is the fun of it.
Vermont does have a reputation for having lots of virtually uncatchable fish, largely due to the popularity of the Battenkill River near Manchester, Vt. The Battenkill fish, living near the Orvis Factory Store, have seen more pairs of waders in their lives than any trout east of, say, Nelson Spring Creek by Livingston, Mont., and they are warier than nature intended them to be.
There is considerable fishing pressure on the White and the Quechee, but never the amount that the Battenkill fish endure. And the small-stream brook trout of central Vermont have a remarkable character that endears them to anglers — they have no memory and, like a domestic duck, wake up to a brand-new world every morning and fearlessly take the same artificial fly that they took the day before.
And they are in the unlikeliest places. The small brook that runs south along Vermont Route 12 from above Barnard to the ‘Quechee River below Woodstock has the larger-than-reality name of Gulf Stream. But stop at the first bridge and look down, and you’ll see the white-edged fins of brook trout, not all of them minnows. That is also one of the prettier black-top roads in Vermont for fall foliage, if you insist on looking up instead of down.
Most people who are taking up fly-fishing, and there are a multitude of them, begin in summer. There is at least one good argument for starting in fall, especially with a guide service that can supply you with waders and everything else you need to find out if you actually like the sport: No Biting Bugs. There may be a few black flies around this week, but they are not as surly as when they hatch in the spring. Mosquitoes are a rarity after a good frost. If leaf-peeping coincided with black fly season, there wouldn’t be a tourism business in New England.
Woodstock is approximately a three-hour drive from Greater Boston, and the simplest route is interstates 93 to 89 to Exit 1 in Vermont and follow Route 4 west.
Accommodations in the height of foliage tourism, especially Columbus Day weekend, cannot be had without reservations. (Peak foliage itself begins on the mountaintops today and progresses from north to south and top to bottom until around Columbus Day in southern Vermont.) The Woodstock Chamber of Commerce (telephone 802 457-1042) can advise on accommodations, and in the peak season has some 400 rooms in private homes to fall back on.