Back when I was paying attention, Pithole was always a mystery to be. It had a lot of nice habitat, was as cold as any other stream of its class in the region and it always had pretty good numbers of small wild fish, or at least more than most of the streams of its type in NW Pa. But the fish seemed to be spotty without any clear causal relationship to the habitat (much like Hemlock Creek, a similar stream) and I very, very seldom caught any wild fish more than an inch or so over legal size.
I finally decided it was simply a weird place..