Manada Creek, Dauphin County, 11/23/2014

[DEPete53]

New member on paflyfish and my first post. Hit Manada on Sunday. Parked at McLean Rd and walked downstream to fish back up. Mostly cloudy with sun poking out a couple of times. About 9 AM when I got there and air was 42. Water at the big slow section near McLean was 35. As wgmiller said in his recent post, the water is quite low. Both sides along the edge where there is little to no water movement had shelf of ice along the entire length. It extended out up to 5 feet in places on the west side and completely covered the mouth of the little stream at the 4-wheeler bridge. I guess nights down into the teens will do that on that shallow slow water. (BTW, does that stream have a name?) Landed a pretty colorful rainbow about 12" from a pool where I always see 8-10 nice fish but until now could never get any to take. This one took a little no-name midge larva dangling from a WB. There were clouds of midges in many places along the way. Couldn't raise anything else til I hooked a 10" fallfish up near where I parked. He took a small BWO dry which I tried for the heck of it as there were a few subtle rises. All in all a nice day to be on the stream though my feet got a little chilled after a while.

Just a quick question - how far above the 4-wheeler bridge is fishing permitted? Driving in just a little on McLean there are all kinds of signs that say no trespassing (or something to that effect).

 

[wgmiller]

The only area up that far that is posted (that I'm aware of) is where the creek enters Gap property. Perhaps there has been recent posting of land between McLean Rd and the creek, I don't know. If that land did get posted, then just navigate the creek. I never fished the east side of the creek up there, so perhaps it's posted for hunting(?) This area always was a bit of a junkyard and where a lot of the construction debris you see downstream came from back in 2011. As far as how far into Gap property you want go, well...

Glad to hear you got into a few. The "upper water" is where I've always found the wild bows. In particular, where the unnamed feeder creeks enter Manada.