dc410
Well-known member
Seems like it shouldn't take a week to post a stream report but here it is. I was working in the State College area last Tuesday and planned on finishing up the day somewhere fishing until dark. I ended up opting out of all of the trout opportunities around the State College area and decided to take the long way home and traveled about an hour east down through the Penns Valley hoping to get into some Smallie and Fallie action! We haven't had much chub chat on here lately. :-D
The afternoon was overcast and very humid with some isolated thunderstorms around the area. There was some distant thunder and off and on drizzle throughout the evening. The water temperature on this section was a balmy 77 degrees.
I caught a lot of Smallmouths and a few scrappy fallfish as well. All of the fish that I caught were on my Olive Wooly Bomber (the fly that I am tying for the current Streamer Swap on PAFF). I generally do real well just fishing this pattern down and across and stripping it back up through the runs, ledgerock structure and along the current seams. I caught a lot of fish using this technique but most of them were in the 8-10" range. I finally decided to switch up my technique and started fishing it upstream and dead drift. I dropped the Wooly Bomber into the eddy of a bushel basket sized subsurface boulder and as soon as the streamer hit the surface a nice, chunky 14-15" smallie rocketed up out of the eddy and absolutely crushed it. Just a short time later in another downstream eddy behind a boulder it produced the exact same results with another similar sized fish. It definitely seemed like that evening the larger fish were stacked up in these prime feeding lies just behind the structure. Sometimes we get into a rut fishing with the same technique but it really pays to switch it up sometimes even when you are catching fish.
There was a pretty heavy Hex hatch that started at about 7:30 PM but only lasted for about 10 minutes. I also saw a few yellow cahills start to emerge just before dark. There was not enough surface activity to warrant me to change to any topwater flies. Real nice evening on lower Penns Creek.
The afternoon was overcast and very humid with some isolated thunderstorms around the area. There was some distant thunder and off and on drizzle throughout the evening. The water temperature on this section was a balmy 77 degrees.
I caught a lot of Smallmouths and a few scrappy fallfish as well. All of the fish that I caught were on my Olive Wooly Bomber (the fly that I am tying for the current Streamer Swap on PAFF). I generally do real well just fishing this pattern down and across and stripping it back up through the runs, ledgerock structure and along the current seams. I caught a lot of fish using this technique but most of them were in the 8-10" range. I finally decided to switch up my technique and started fishing it upstream and dead drift. I dropped the Wooly Bomber into the eddy of a bushel basket sized subsurface boulder and as soon as the streamer hit the surface a nice, chunky 14-15" smallie rocketed up out of the eddy and absolutely crushed it. Just a short time later in another downstream eddy behind a boulder it produced the exact same results with another similar sized fish. It definitely seemed like that evening the larger fish were stacked up in these prime feeding lies just behind the structure. Sometimes we get into a rut fishing with the same technique but it really pays to switch it up sometimes even when you are catching fish.
There was a pretty heavy Hex hatch that started at about 7:30 PM but only lasted for about 10 minutes. I also saw a few yellow cahills start to emerge just before dark. There was not enough surface activity to warrant me to change to any topwater flies. Real nice evening on lower Penns Creek.
