Up
Delaware River
Salmon River
|
 |
Exceptional guide has eye for fish
It was Adrian
LaSorte's day off; the first in nearly a month. So naturally he spent it fishing. That's
not an unusual way to spend a day off, except when you've spent ever day of the previous
three weeks fishing.
Well, not exactly fishing. LaSorte is a Delaware River guide and as
such he takes other people fishing. A guide is more than a waterborne cab driver,
providing a ride down the river. He has to be a combination mind reader, diplomat,
motivator, coach, counselor and sometimes nanny. But most of all, a good guide has to be a
hunter, a hunter of fish.
There are plenty of trout in the Delaware and its branches, but not so
many that an angler can simply cast a fly willy-nilly and expect to catch many of them.
That is where a good guide comes in. He knows from long experience and from an ability to
read the water where trout will be or are likely to be. He knows their feeding habits and
he knows what insects will be emerging from the river and when.
With all those obligations to paying clients, a good guide has no time
to fish. But this day was different. On this day his clients his father, Dr. Tony LaSorte,
and another freeloader, weren't paying. So Adrian could fish to his heart's content.
Watching him fish is almost as enjoyable as fishing itself. Aside from
casting skills that are a testimony to years on trout streams and salmon rivers, and
eyesight that suggests he may have been an osprey in a previous life, Adrian seems to have
an intuitive sense of where fish are.
Sure enough, he found fish, one at least, shortly after we launched his
guide boat at Ball's Eddy about two miles upstream from Hancock on the Pennsylvania side
of the West, Branch, a 12-inch rainbow that used the swift current to fight like a trout
three times its size.
We went fishless for nearly an hour after that, before Adrian located a
midstream trough that held several trout, a few of which Tony and I caught and released.
Adrian, meanwhile, had left the boat and waded over to a tiny island that split the
river's flow near the north side of the stream.
He returned a few minutes later. "Come on," he said,
"you've got to see this." With that he lifted the anchor and dragged the boat to
the island.
What we had to see was a pod of a dozen or more trout, browns and
rainbows as it turned out, feeding furiously on emerging Hendricksons. For the next 10
minutes, we did nothing but catch and release fat, belligerent Delaware River trout.
And this is what sets guided float fishing apart from wading. Someone
unfamiliar with the river would not have found this place, except by accident and then
only after walking for miles on the railroad right-of-way. Access on the West Branch is
difficult.
There were more fish and bigger fish later on, including a magnificent
17-inch rainbow that Adrian browbeat into taking his fly on per- haps the 50th cast, but
for me, that brief frenzied interlude on the side channel was the high point of the day.
We caught about 20 fish among the three of us, released all of them,
and missed or lost half that many.
Dave Rossie
Wildlife Watch
Rossie is associate editor of the Press &
Sun-Bulletin. His Wildlife Watch appears on Sundays.
[ Home ] [ Next ] |