Catskill Angling

It's said that once you visit the Hudson Valley, you'll always return to stay. I never had a chance of living anywhere else; I was only six weeks old when my parents bundled my sister and me into the car and headed north for a fall weekend upstate. My parents' destination was the bank of the Esopus River, and the purpose (at least my father's) was fly fishing.

He'd certainly come to the right place. The Catskill's abundance of wide, mountain-born streams make it the perfect habitat for trout and the fishermen who've been heading here to tempt them with feather-wrapped hooks for over a hundred years.

Fly fishing is bait fishing's elite cousin; fly fishermen use long, flexible poles, weighted lines, and light, artfully crafted imitation insects to trick fish into mouthing a hook. It's a skilled, ancient sport favored by the European aristocracy, but it wasn't very popular in America until a reclusive Catskill fisherman named Theodore Gordon made a big improvement in lure craft in the late 1800s. European anglers used "wet" flies to mimic the larval insects that enticed continental trout, but Gordon's stiff-hackled, feather-winged "dry" flies copied the flying insects American trout preferred.

Other anglers were quick to catch on to Gordon's ideas, and the word spread, and spread, and spread...By the end of the 1800s, the Catskills were a mecca for fly fishermen and fly fishing-related craftspeople, scientists, and writers. That period of intense, creative fomentation changed the sport enormously, and made the Catskills forever famous as the cradle of American fly fishing..

In the early days, the plentiful Eastern brook trout were anglers' primary target. But then overfishing took its toll, and so did the leather tanning industry's Hemlock harvests. Bare, eroding streamsides added silt and heat to the water, and brook trout, deprived of the chilly temperatures they needed, started dying off. Imported stocks of the more heat-tolerant European brown and Western rainbow trout came to the sport's rescue; these fish adapted well to the Catskills' waters, and have thrived here since.