Fishing the Lehigh

In honor of the first day of the Trout Season for 2010, I offer this essay:

For the Pennsylvania angler, there are many forms of fishing to be experienced. From trolling the depths of Lake Erie for salmon, “still fishing” at night for catfish, jigging through a hole in the ice of a frozen lake, or riding a high-powered bass boat across a lake to a favorite weed bed, the choices are numerous. Without disparaging these pursuits however, fishing in Pennsylvania for me has always been about streams… and trout.

     The trout is a wonderful food-seeking engine. Whether brook, brown or rainbow, it is a sleek, torpedo, painted with precise and tasteful patterns of red, silver, brown and blue, aesthetic in a way unmatched by the pallid green of most other game fish.  For the most part, they exist in rivers and streams, searching for a variety of food sources including crayfish, minnows and most importantly, aquatic insects.

   Trout behavior is if nothing else, logical. They favor positions in the flow where they are protected from the current (and thus expend less energy), but have ready access to the main channel where the food is plentiful. Larger fish generally get the most favorable locations. Fishermen know this, they cast their lures into the relatively quiet water behind large rocks, or near to eddies and undercut banks.

    Pennsylvania is well known as a desirable trout fishing destination. It is our topography that determines this. With large regions of ridges and valleys; with mountains that are high enough, but not too high, our state is interlaced with excellent trout water. From the remote hemlock-shaded streams of the Allegheny National Forest, to the more open limestone creeks of the central state, to the upper Delaware River, the angling opportunities seem almost endless.

     Though there are many ways to fish for trout, fly-fishing is by far the most challenging. For most anglers, the goal of an outing is to catch multiple, preferably large, fish however you can.  Fly fishermen see it somewhat differently. Limiting themselves to the use of odd-looking wisps of feathers, hair, and thread as bait; they seek to present the quarry with unlikely replicas of the aquatic insects that on that month, day and hour, and in that particular creek, are the trout’s likely food source.

    To accomplish this with any consistency, one must not only understand trout and their behavior, but also the etymology of aquatic insects. Much of the fishing is “catch and release”, facilitated by the use of “barbless” hooks.  Thus in effect, the trout ceases to be a trophy, but becomes instead a judge, testing the accuracy of the fly tiers art, the gentleness of the cast, and the angler’s knowledge of stream biology.

     This is not to say that trophy fish are not pursued. Even in this gentle art, landing a huge, slack-jawed creature is an exiting and memorable event. The fish is handled gently, measured, and perhaps photographed, then as quickly as possible returned to the streams embrace.  A taxidermist may later immortalize it; working from the snapshots and dimensions to create a replica of that noble creature.

    As we later admire it, mounted perhaps on a den wall, it is fun to think that the magnificent spirit depicted there probably still exists. One can imagine it, grown slightly larger now, slipping quietly through the waters of that very same stream, waiting patiently for the next juicy morsel to float by.

On the Dike

Long ago, as a young man, I acquired my first SLR. It was a Fuji body with a 50mm f1.9 lens. Before this acquisition, I had only used “point and shoot cameras. The “fifty” was the standard lens for SLR bodies in those days, useful because 50mm for 35mm film, is a so-called “normal” lens; the field of view close to that of normal human visual perception. At the time, most zoom lenses were far inferior to their so-called single focal length “prime” lens. They also tended to be slow, with narrow apertures that limit subject isolation, and light gathering.

This lens/body combination had an extraordinary ability to recreate what I was actually seeing with my eyes to the film stock.

I remember the joy of discovery when my slides were developed. After many years of shooting compact cameras like the Olympus XA 2, I was able to capture the scene as I remembered it. The lens was razor sharp, and the format was liberating.  I was finally able to control the depth of field in an image. I was 18 years old, and I was hooked.

Later in life I became intrigued with digital imaging. The thought that I would be able to control the whole image path, from acquisition to print was irresistible.

 Affordable early digital cameras were modest devices. I was forced initially to abandon larger “sensor” photography for point and shoot digital cameras that were available before the millennial change (the few digital SLRs available were very expensive).  These cameras were rangefinder devices; it was hard to get a feel for how the final image would appear.

Many of us acquired digital SLRs in the early 2000s. These bodies, whether Canon or Nikon, had smaller than 35mm sensors, forcing a crop factor of 1.5 on the traditional system lenses. As a Nikon user, I began to collect F mount lenses including the Nikkor 50mm f1.8. On a DX format body, like my Fuji S5 or my Nikon D2x, this glass is a 75mm equivalent portrait lens, and I have used it to good effect in this role. I had a Nikkor 35mm f 2.0 that, with the crop factor, was close to a 50mm equivalent but I never felt as though I experienced the sense of immediacy that I experienced with my film SLR and a “normal” lens.

Last year, I purchased a Nikon D 700 which has a full size 35mm sensor (Nikon calls it the FX format) of extraordinary quality. Many of the zoom lenses I had collected were dedicated to the smaller DX format and were not useful. Happily I had begun to purchase a variety of prime lenses, suitable for the full 35mm sensors. I had also kept a lookout for pro level full frame zooms on EBay and have purchased several. These are also fine performers; technology has allowed zoom lenses to approach, and sometimes surpass the optics of earlier primes. Anyway, it is wonderful to use a lens at it traditional (for 35 mm) focal length again.

I keep coming back to that 50mm.  It’s small, discrete and pin sharp. The wide aperture allows me to shoot in low light, and creates a pleasant blur effect when desired, for shooting people. In short- it sees what I see.