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Truckee a tough river to fish
The Truckee River can be a very humbling river to fish. I moved to Truckee in 1978 and tried to learn to fly fish by teaching myself.
Neither that method or the river were particularly good choices for a beginner. I never did master the river as a fly angler, although I was able to do well fishing with crawdad imitating plugs.
I moved to the west side of the Sierra in 1981 and I have continued to fish the Truckee and keep in contact with locals who fish it regularly. Part of the reason that the Truckee can be so difficult is the water temperature cycle through the season.
Starting opening day in April, the flows are fishable, but the water temperatures are too cold for good fishing. As the season warms and the snows melt, the river runs high and cold.
Fishing the pits
A few are little more than summer mud holes. Others resemble farm ponds. Some swallow 100 or more acres. Many are stunningly deep, clear and, in a few spots, surprisingly cold. Nearly all are fishable. "A couple of the lakes have trout in them," said Rob Rold, assistant fisheries biologist for the Department of Fish and Wildlife's southeastern district. "They're deep enough and cold enough to support them." My fishing partner John Durbin and I weren't looking for trout. And even if we had it would practically have taken downriggers to reach them, and we were armed with a couple of handcrafted bamboo fly rods from Durbin's workshop -- tools not really designed for deep-water probing. If the fish weren't near the top of the water column, they would remain safe from us.
EPA may ease rules for water transfer
Fishermen scored a victory this year when they successfully argued sediment and heated water flowing out of the Schoharie Reservoir was ruining trout habitat in a world renowned fly fishing stream, the Esopus Creek. The New York City De-partment of Environmental Protection was ordered to pay as much as $5.75 million in civil penalties, and it had to get a Clean Water Act permit for its Shandaken Tunnel piping system, which transfers water from one part of the Catskill mountains to another. The permit requires the city to develop strategies for protecting trout habitat in that portion of its vast upstate drinking water collection system. The Environmental Protection Agency is on the verge of undercutting the basis for the argument used successfully in the case by Trout Unlimited, Riverkeeper and the New York Attorney General.
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