Mayflies
Caddisflies
The crown jewel of Eastern tailwaters — cold, fertile, gin-clear water below Cannonsville holding big, wild, ferociously selective browns and rainbows. The sulphur season runs long and late here because the release runs cold, and the fish demand the kind of long-leader, perfect-drift fishing that humbles people. You watch the release clock and the thermometer, not the sky.
The West Branch of the Delaware is, for a lot of serious eastern anglers, simply the best wild trout water in the East. It comes out of Cannonsville Reservoir as a cold tailwater and runs down to Hancock to meet the East Branch, and that cold release is everything — it keeps the West Branch fishable through the summer heat that shuts down the freestones around it, and grows wild browns and rainbows that are large, abundant and as selective as any trout in America. The river is a clear, even, riffle-and-pool tailwater over freestone cobble, winding through a wooded Catskill valley with the flow governed by reservoir releases and an ongoing argument over them. The bed is rounded cobble and ledge, the surface glassy on the flats where the big fish sip. Wading is comfortable on firm footing — the difficulty, as ever on these rivers, is the trout, not the river.
Wading: Glassy flats, release dependent flows
- Sandstone shale
- Unconfined
- Pool riffle