My objective for going to Hemlock this weekend was for a
"shake-out" stay at the trailer and make sure it was ready when the
fishing got good later on this month. It's a good thing I did. I
arrived mid-afternoon on Thursday to find Rudy raking leaves on my
lane. I undid all of the ropes holding my tarp on but it seemed that
it was stuck. Turns out it was. A small branch had come down and put
a hole in my roof. That's the bad news. The good news was that the
hole was in the roof leading to the cabinet above the sink. There
happened to be a plastic bowl so all the rain (there wasn't much) had
gone into the bowl. Rudy was kind enough to lend me his ladder and
after a trip to the hardware store for silicone, I fixed the hole. I
took a walk up to ROFF Penns Clave HQ and everything there looks fine.
I walked up the hill and looked down at the roof and it looks very
clean.

Fishing on Penns was tough. Wading was very problematic. The color of
the water was pretty reasonable, but there was toooooo much of it. I
tried fishing below the RR bridge then above it but since I sold my
boat along with the Danforth it came with, there wasn't enough weight
in Coburn to get my fly down to where it needed to be. It was good to
wet a line in Penns however.

On Saturday I bumped into a friend at the Feathered Hook who I met on
my first trip up to Penns in 2001- Bede. I was planning on going to go
to Fishing Creek but he invited me to go to Spring Creek with him. I
accepted and we went below the Benner Spring Hatchery. We had a great
time! I caught 15 or 16 fish including a 15 inch brown. I got =BD of
them on a green egg pattern and =BD on a green weenie.

At 4:30 the caddis started coming off. I figured this would be a
opportunity to practice my timing. I used a brown caddis in size 14.
I caught 4 and missed 6 others. It's timing you know. So from 4:30
to 5:15 I fished the caddis but then they stopped. At 6:00 PM as the
sun was going behind the trees and the temperature started to drop the
BWOs came off and I switched to a size 20. I got 5 more on that fly
but missed a few more.

SO- when Penns is off limits I highly recommend Spring below the
hatchery as an alternative. If you don't mind fishing for stockies
along side bait fisherman it's entertaining. There are some big fish
there and there are a ton of them. If you go down stream far enough it
really not that crowded, even on a Saturday.

The weather on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday was picture perfect but not
fishing perfect. It was in the low 70's and not a cloud in the sky.
Water temps were in the low 50's.