I woke up this morning at 5:30 and looked out at a glorious dawn. Impulsively, I decided that I was going out to the Credit again, to a location I had scouted a few days before, the little town of Glen Williams.
The Credit River is a large river in Southern Ontario, and it offers a lot of different locations and styles of fishing for anglers. In the headwaters, or Upper Credit, the river is cold and fast, and holds a native brook trout and brown trout fishery; in the centre of the watershed you can fish for brown, rainbow and brook trout, and in the lower Credit you have runs of steelhead as well as Coho and Chinook salmon. I have been focusing on the Upper Credit as the fishing in these water is fast and exciting. Glen Williams was no exception.
I had targeted three prime locations, and after scouting them I picked one and waded in. I fished for about 30 minutes working the various areas in the river but was not having any luck so I took a few minutes to change my fly. Standing in knee deep water in the middle of an extremely fast current is not a place to be particular, so I decided to go with an old standby, a caddis fly. I tied it on and turned to start working the river again in the same areas.
Within twenty minutes I had one on the hook. It didn’t take long to bring it in, a nice sized brook trout, about 12 inches long. As I’ve said on many occasions, brook trout are my personal favourite; their markings and coloration are really beautiful.
I went back at it, and about twenty minutes later I had another on the line, this time it was a nice little brown trout, this one was about 11 inches. I worked upstream and about half an hour later another 11 inch brown was in the books.
The element here was patience. I had cast over these same areas with a different fly, a blue winged olive, but had nothing to show for it. After changing to the caddis, there was still nothing happening but I had the feeling that I had to keep going with it. Sometimes you have to present the fly several times before a wary trout will take notice of it, especially if you can’t identify what flies are hatching at the time. This was the case here. Once the trout accepted the caddis, they started hitting it.
I packed it in at about 11:00, as I had been fishing then for over four hours. This is by no means a long time, but my intention when coming out was just to put in a few hours on the river, and that is exactly what I did. Mind you, standing in the middle of the Credit River current with the water well above your knees for four hours is a good workout, so it was an opportune time to call it a day.
Bottom line: 1 brook trout, 4 brown trout, and one great start to Fathers’ Day.
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