We’ve been busy with guide training and our travels over the past week have taken us to the Upper and Middle Delaware, Susquehanna, and Lehigh Rivers. Honestly, nothing has fished stellar. We had a large healthy trout caught by Colin in our guide school while targeting smallies, but in general the smallmouth ahve not turned on in great numbers on the Lehigh yet. We’ll have more exploration this week.

The Susquehanna was sad. I don’t know what else to say. The water is cooking and the bite is early morning and evening and it’s not good. Last year we saw some quality fishing which made us hopeful and we intend to test fish a little further north  but the Harrisburg area is not fishing well.

The Upper D was challenging as always. We were there bedore the short bubble of water was released and I’m pretty sure everybody landed fish. Brian Z. from Maryland had a hog on in the West Branch but it came unbuttoned. I(Tim S.) lost a nice brown aside of the boat. Hatches were BWOs(#14-22), Sulphurs(#14-20), Cahills(#12) and various caddis. Best hookups came from CDC and Unusual BWOs(#14-20), and E.Vitrea dun imitations(Large Amber Sulphur #14).

We’ll have more reports this week. The Tully and the West Branch of the Delaware are fishing well at this time. Not much is fishing consistently for smallmouth, a cool down would help.

We hit the Susquehanna River for the second time in as many weeks and were pleased once again, the numbers maybe a little lower than they were years ago but there are plenty of fish and the average fish is BIG. The target area was Duncannon to Fort Hunter and though the fly fishing was very tough, hardware turned up lots of big fish. High water conditions have persisted on the Susky and we lost more hogs than we landed but still it’s exciting to see healthy smallies in the river once again. Fish are spread out all over the river but we worked hard for them and everybody left with some tennis elbow from the sheer number of long casts to try to cover as much water as possible. We would advise anglers to take some hardware with when heading to the Susquehanna at this time as it turned up fish at a much higher rate. Some White Flies were spotted but very little surface activity. Chain Reaction Leeches, Sculpins, Hellgrammites, and crayfish patterns will produce on the fly rod, bring a heavy sink tip. Tubes were hot on the spin rods.

The river is a bit high but we hit it up today to see how the river is shaping up this year. Due to water levels the fly fishing was tough with no surface activity. Most fish were caught with hardware and tubes. The fish are all over the river and you can expect to make a lot of casts to turn up good numbers of fish which was difficult with fly tackle at current flows. Any large streamer patterns in either dark or flourescent colors will work, Chain Reaction Leeches on a sink tip are as good as it gets. Action was fast and furious at times and should improve as the water drops.