Falling For Trout In The Club

At times it’s nice to fly fish to large trout without having to think too much. When I feel this way, I typically head west to the Yellow Creek Trout Club (“YCTC”) in Indiana County, Pennsylvania. I try to get out to YCTC once a quarter and experience catching big trout throughout the different seasons. I never fished the club when there was snow on the ground and figured it would provide for a nice backdrop with temperatures forecasted to be in the 40s. I met the owner Steve at 7:00am on Saturday morning. The club road was slick but with four-wheel drive I was able to get down to the club pavilion without much issue. I was the first person in the lot. I walked over and took a look at Yellow Creek.

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Yellow Creek Trout Club, Andrea Larko Edition

Heading into this past weekend I was finally expecting a proper spring weekend. The daytime temperatures for Saturday were forecasted to be as high as 75°. I was excited to get out and fly fish anywhere in Pennsylvania because for the first time in three weeks water levels were perfect. The list of streams I’ve wanted to fish during the spring months has been steadily growing. Although I had my sights set on Big Pine Creek, I decided I’d head to the Yellow Creek Trout Club. If you’re asking yourself why I’d head to club waters during the middle of April, you are justified. However, I had a great opportunity to meet-up with fly fishing artist Andrea Larko to chat about a project I’m working on and do some fishing. Big Pine Creek would have to wait.

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Blown Out In The Mid-Atlantic

Late last week the mid-Atlantic was soaked by a large weather system that extended from New York, all the way to southern Virginia. On Friday afternoon I was looking at stream gauge after stream gauge on the USGS website and it was one spiked chart after another. By Friday evening, it was official, unless I wanted to drive 10 hours west to fish in central Kentucky on the Hatchery Creek; I wasn’t going to be fishing on Saturday. Accepting these realizations drove me crazy. Heaven forbid I take a Saturday and relax, tie flies, or do some reading. But this is April and April means hatching mayflies and trout. What made it worse was the realization that streams weren’t coming down overnight and Sunday was probably out too. On Saturday afternoon I shot Steve from Yellow Creek Trout Club a text and asked him how the water levels were out in Indiana, Pennsylvania. The picture he texted back surprised me. While the water levels were higher than normal, the watercolor was an amazing shade of green. That was the only convincing I needed, I was fly fishing Yellow Creek on Sunday.

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Here’s To Fly Fishing, Fall Trout, And Another Six Months

This past weekend was the six month anniversary of the Wooly Bugged blog. It is incredible how fast six months can go by. I was reading over some of my posts and watching videos from the spring of 2016 and it felt like a lifetime ago. A lot of great memories captured online for as long as the internet will exist, or in the case of my blog, as long as I pay my website hosting bill. The idea for Wooly Bugged started back in May of this year after I decided to take a trip to the Yellow Creek Trout Club to christen my Orvis Recon. I caught more fish than I could count on that trip and I haven’t had bad luck on the Recon since. It seemed fitting to celebrate my six month Wooly Bugged anniversary by taking a day trip back to the Yellow Creek Trout Club.

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