After about forty years of chasing trout from Maine to California and beyond, I know that the Battenkill is my favorite place.
This might be true only because, among many other spots, I know it best. Certainly within rivers of my acquaintance the 'Kill is the prettiest. Its open meadows, gentle landscape, and clear pools seem in wonderful harmony with the valley's picturesque villages; all combining as an image of what a trout stream should be and all too seldom is. It is a pastoral picture seemingly re-created from Isaac Walton's 1653 Compleat Angler, in which he was as eloquent about the rural British countryside as about its fishing, although unlike Walton's enchanting tale I've seen no voluptuous milkmaids cavorting along the river.
The Battenkill is also among the most - if not the most - technically difficult fly-fishing streams in America. I say this not from some perverse hometown pride but from experience. The fishing in other American rivers famous for their demands on angling tactics - Fall River, Silver Creek, the Henrys Fork, Armstrong's, the Firehole, the Letort, the Beaverkill, or Housatonic - is relatively easy by comparison. Some fly fishermen will resent my having said this; most Battenkill veterans will agree with it. The late John Atherton, whose 1951 book The Fly and the Fish was largely based on his long Battenkill experience, called it "the most difficult of rivers and yet the most rewarding in the things which count the most."
Late in the 1970s, when Joan and the late Lee Wulff were moving from New Hampshire to New York's Beaverkill Valley to establish a fishing school, I asked Lee why they weren't going to the New York Battenkill instead, where Lee had lived between 1940 and 1960 and where he still owned land. He gave a number of reasons, such as drawing students from the suburban New York market, among which was the obvious need for beginning students to be able to catch some trout. His beginners could catch at least a few Beaverkill fish, he said, but similar results with Battenkill browns would be almost impossible.
There are several reasons for this. The trout themselves are all wild, streambred fish by their very nature harder to catch than the hatchery trout to which many visiting fishermen are accustomed. The only exceptions are those brown trout stocked by New York in the lower downstream of the special-regulations section, generally from Shushan downstream to the Route 22 bridge crossing and beyond. Here one can fish near the highway bridges where stocking is done and sometimes catch numerous seven- to eight-inch-long hatchery browns while using a Hornberg, Mickey Finn, or any other general attractor pattern to which such easily duped fish often respond. These same tactics work so seldom in the upstream wild-trout water as to be not worth trying, although fishermen accustomed to this sort of fishing often do try to their eventual frustration.
The Battenkill's wild brown and brook trout are also well educated and often exceptionally fussy as to fly pattern. This attribute isn't unique to the river, being common among many hard-fished trout streams, but it is part of the trout fishing equation here. Partly because of the Battenkill's long-standing reputation, and partly because of the nearby Orvis Company, there are numerous skilled fly fishermen living on or near the river, more than are found in actual residence near the Beaverkill or Housatonic, for example. Most of them fish the river regularly and release most of their fish. By the time one of the river's brown trout reaches age three and is about ten inches long, he or she has quite literally seen it all as far as fishing tactics are concerned. Interestingly, the Battenkill's larger brown trout, meaning those greater than fourteen inches long, when found (rarely) rising are usually easier to fool than smaller browns or brook trout that tend to be more fussy. I believe this is because the bigger browns rise much less frequently than smaller ones, and thus have less short-term experience with dry flies.
Trout in the Battenkill are also easily spooked. Sloppy wading, grinding gravel underfoot, slapping the water's surface with your line, and casting a careless shadow are among many things that send trout here darting for cover. Many fishermen are accustomed to hatchery fish that are in turn accustomed to and not bothered by human activity. Others frequent catch-and-release areas, such as on the Beaverkill, where many smaller trout develop a tolerance that allows a close approach with little care. Not so on the Battenkill, where bad habits acquired elsewhere just plain won't work. The wild trout on the 'Kill are just that - wild - and the fisherman who sloppily wades its quiet waters will frighten dozens of trout for every one he or she catches.
However, streambred, selective, and skittish trout are found in other rivers, too, and don't alone account for the Battenkill's widely known difficulty. Additional angling problems spring from the river's physical character. Because of its low gradient, much of the river is comprised of long, slow-flowing flat pools interspersed with short riffles. The bottom is generally composed of small stones, again because of the slow current, and there's very little cover for trout at midstream. Most trout most of the time are found along the banks, associated with larger rocks, half-sunken logs, or overhanging brush. Instead of being concentrated at the tumbling head of a pool - as is common in many rivers - the trout are strung out along the edges of a brushy flat that may be from one to two hundred yards long and often more. Here the slow-flowing water is clear, from a few inches to three feet deep, and here the wild trout hold with little effort. They have all the time in the world to carefully examine every tidbit - including your fly - as it floats slowly past.
The current often looks smooth and of consistent speed - perfect for dry-fly work - but it's not. First, the current near the bank is almost always slower than at midstream, so drag is an inevitable problem. Second, because of slight irregularities in the bottom, there usually are numerous intermittent and random whorls of current traveling from the bottom to the surface, where the whorls flatten, spread, and gradually disappear as their energy dissipates. This creates secondary surface currents of irregular and unpredictable speed that turn your drifting fly line into a writhing eel, with a dragging fly the result. I have seen this phenomenon on other rivers, but never to the same extent. Primary currents in other rivers seem either fast enough to make such secondary currents insignificant or slow enough so these current events occur seldom. On the Battenkill, secondary surface currents are a fly fisherman's nightmare, often requiring considerable skill to achieve drag-free floats.
The hatches are different, too. Because of the river's
low gradient and generally slow flow, its streambed is relatively homogeneous. Small, smooth stones ranging in size up to a football are the most common type while sand, silt, and beds of rotting leaves are found in the slower margins. Because the stream-bottom habitat is different than that of most other trout streams, the aquatic community is different, also.
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You can catch more and bigger trout in Montana, pop a few beers at the Grizzly Bar, and listen to a honky-tonk jukebox down by the Madison. It's a loose, fun, uninhibited kind of fishing. The Battenkill is more like Bach; with green hills, covered bridges, and white-clapboarded villages forming the gently repeating steps of a sweetly insistent fugue in which rising trout play an occasional part. Perhaps you'll develop a taste for it. As I have.
Excerpted from The Battenkill: An Intimate Portrait of a Great Trout River - Its History, People, and Fishing Possibilities by John Merwin. ©1993 by John Merwin. Reprinted courtesy of Lyons & Burford Publishers. John Merwin, a distinguished fisherman and writer, lives in Dorset, Vt.
Fishing the 'Kill