Little sandy venango county

[Troutbum82]

I fished little sandy the other day and had a great day. Caught a bunch of stockers from route 62 up to the pump house. Then i fished from the pump house up stream to the first bridge and caught 5 beautiful wild browns including a nice 13 incher. Caught them on a drowned beetle pattern. This was the fourth time i fished this creek and im pretty sure im going to become a regular on this stream. Its just a great stream for fly fishing.

 

[PennKev]

Yeah, I don't even know why the worry about stocking LSC.

 

[greenghost]

I think Little Sandy is the most overrated stream in WPA for a number of reasons:
1) The hatches suck since they started mining in the headwaters about 15 years ago.

2) There are some wild fish but they are so few and far between, unless you intimately know the stream, stocking is an absolute necessity to support any fishing pressure

3) Poaching is and always has been a big problem in the Special Regs area

4) The stream is so small and the fish so wary, if someone has fished your stretch within a few hours, you may as well pack it up

5) There are many other (and unknown) waters in the area that fish better day to day

 

[troutslammer]

greenghost i take u don't do well on that stream ?

 

[Fishidiot]

Troutbum,
What was the date you fished? We request this in the title line.
Thanks,
Dave W

 

[muskylund1]

I used to enjoy fishing Little Sandy when I lived in Western PA. All the things that Greenghost said were true back then. I always thought that the stream had more potential than was actually realized, but I still enjoyed fishing it. I caught my first wild trout on that stream: a small Brown that took a Letort cricket. Over time I found other streams that I liked better, but I still found time to fish Lindy Sandy. I had some good days fishing it in early Winter and Late Winter/Early Spring. One time in early March I hit some rising trout just below the bridge by the pump house parking area. That was some pretty fast fishing on a little BWO early in the year. I never found the fish to be particularly choosy on this stream. If you could avoid spooking them and someone hadn't just fished through the area a well presented fly would usually get bit. I always wondered what this stream could have been if more habitat work were done and stocking was ended.

 

[greenghost]

Good point about the potential. But it is unrealized as of right now.

However, hats off to the Oil Creek TU. They've been doing some very fine work on the restoration and shoring up erosion around the trestle. I believe if they could upgrade the holding water between the Pump House and the trestle, wild trout could perhaps flourish better than now. Aside from a couple of jack dams, much of it is flat, shallow and featureless water.

What disturbs me most though is the drop off of hatches. People I've talked to feel the bugs just aren't in the number they were 15 to 20 years ago. Some caddis, sulfurs, drakes and BWOs, but I haven't seen a good hatch there forever. (Maybe my timing has been off.)

Has anyone recently encountered a fairly heavy hatch there?

 

[dryflyguy]

I can remember quite a few people talking about the great hatches on this stream when I first started flyfishing in the early '80s.
So I gave it a try from time to time. But I've never seen much of anything coming off it.
There are only a few spots that I've ever found fish rising somewhat.
And I have caught some on terrestials there.

Ghost - your avatar brings back childhood memories. My friends and I used to think that game was so cool!

 

[greenghost]

dfg,
I used to fish it in late May during a decent sulphur hatch and a few weeks later during the drakes. But the last decent hatch I fished on it was probably in the mid 90's. It was right about then that strip mining started too. Coincidence?

lol... yeah, Green Ghost was definitely a cool board game to play when I was a kid back in the early 70's! I would always find "Kelly" GG's child.

 

[PennKev]

On LSC, the best hatches I've hit with good numbers of bugs at one time are BWO's and Blue Quill's. Both usually produce a good number of rising fish also. I've also hit decent MB/Grey Fox hatches too. All as recent as this past spring. I would not call any of the hatches remarkable, but I've always done well on surface patterns. Midges tend to produce consistently also.

As for habitat, the FFO area is probably the worst area of the stream. It should really only be about half as wide as it is. There are other wide strtetches with poor habitat but the special regs, except for a couple spots, is a wreck IMO. Anywhere the stream is narrow and there is some sort of cover or reasonable depth, there are wild trout. However, there are not many such areas in the FFO stretch.

Are there better streams, sure. But I've always done well there and the streams always seems to suprise me in the size and numbers of fish it produces. One day I got 7 brookies out a great little pool. The next year I had a day where I got two 14" browns and lost a third larger fish out of the same pool.

Kev

 

[streamerguy]

I decided to give Little Sandy a try this morning on my way home from Erie and did pretty well. I fished the FFO section. I was going to try some other stretches to try to catch a wild fish, but I didn't need to, I got a small wild brown just a little ways down from the pump house. Also picked up about 5 stocked bows. All the fish were caught on a small glo bug, tried a bunch of other things but they wouldn't hit anything else. TU did do some work, but I noticed the habitat isn't the greatest, but probably better than it was before TU did the work.