Susquehanna & Letort Spring Run 6/24

[LehighGuide]

I fished the Suskie with fellow guide Brent and we were disappointed. I really had higher expectations for the river this year. We floated from Clemson Island to the Riverfront Campground in Duncannon and caught maybe 7 smallies in 10 hours. The water was gin clear, 82?(yikes) by noon, and of course low. I don't think the high temp would bother me so much if it wasn't so early in the summer but I thought it was a bit high from what I remember. A few carp were spotted with white infection patches on them, all smallies appeared to be healthy(no infections at least). Several rises were spotted throughout the day but throwing a small popper at them yielded nothing, they appeared to be eating damsel flies which were clustered close to the water in mating swarms. No fish were hooked with flies, try as we might, the only thing we could seem to catch them with was a small rapala in a perch color pattern. Even when we switched to other color patterns they yielded nothing. We pounded the river with flies, big and small crayfish and hellagrammite patterns, streamers, poppers, etc ... nothing. We will be fishing from Duncannon to Marysville this week and we'll see what we encounter there.

After the Suskie we migrated over to the Letort, Marinaro's Meadow, extremely ill-equipped but cheerful nonetheless. I think Brent was using his 9' 6wt and I had nothing but my monster 10' 7wt with and my smallest tippet spool was 5x, a skunking was expected. That said Brent missed a small trout, sulphur emerger I think, and I hooked up with a trout around 12-13" with a small foam ant but he got off quickly. Ironically, I saw more sulphurs on the Susquehanna. Water was a little cloudy.

 

[shipnfish2006]

Wow Clemson to Duncannon is a pretty good stretch but Duncannon to Marysville has a lot more "pocket" water. Hellgramite patterns or Black Wooly Buggers produce real well in here pretty much dead drifted. Also give chart/white clousers a try. Not to metion crystal buggers, I prefer gold the most, stripped aggressively. If you decide to switch back to the spin side watermelon tubes are real good on this stretch. I usually wait til I get to a spot where theres a break in the water and then just pound that pool as hard as possible. When coming into Marysville and you see the "statue of liberty"(You can't miss it) fish around these pilars there are usually a lot of bass in this section, but it gets pounded on the weekends.

 

[LehighGuide]

Thanks Ship,
I've guided on the Susquehanna for about 6 years so it's not really a case of not knowing what or how to fish there, simply a population density issue. I'll be fishing the stretch from Duncannon to Marysville tomorrow so hopefully we'll find the fishing better there. I think the saddest part of yesterday was parking the drift boat in the beautiful ledges and deep drop offs and pounding them long and hard only to find no fish. You know it's bad when they won't eat live bait and all of the bait guys we talked too were not doing well. Maybe(hopefully) it was just a funky day but I have a feeling it's just more of the same on the mighty Susquehanna.