Fly Fishing Mulhockaway Creek

Down and immediately around the corner, Mulhockaway Creek empties into Spruce Run Reservoir.

I phoned Oliver Round Thursday afternoon about the possibility of high water; we decided we would arrive at the Mulhockaway Friday morning just after first light as planned, hoping the water would come down enough for any trout to see our flies. As the morning turned out, I got there right at first light, which I understand as the moments when blue tones slightly emerge in the sky from blackness. That was shortly after 6:00 a.m., when shortly after that I began writing in the notebook I keep in my car, using the overhead light so I could see. Oliver arrived 25 minutes later. He had ventured the idea of us bringing spinning rods and spinners, just in case the hole near the reservoir we read about were to be fishable. I told him that flood events like this result in browns running. Whether or not they move into the creek prior to spawning this early in the fall, I don't know. My feeling is that it doesn't happen until about November. A number of really big brown trout--supposedly born and bred in this creek--have been caught in the reservoir during recent years, as big as 10 pounds.

We found the creek running high but pretty clear, visibility better than two feet. This is our first time fishing here, and we didn't expect to find the creek as large as it is. I felt very pleased at our discovering a number of deep holes, and fairly near the tailout of one them as we quickly progressed downstream, I caught a nine-inch rainbow trout while fishing a beadhead Wooly Bugger/#16 beadhead Pheasant Tail dropper arrangement under a strike indicator. That must be a holdover from spring stocking, unless wild browns get all the word and rainbows reproduce, too, silently overlooked. Why rainbows reproduce in some New Jersey wild trout streams, but not others, I don't understand.

We had to get to the reservoir quickly, because I had to be at work at 1:00 pm. Rather than getting to the reservoir itself, we fished about a hundred yards of widened slow water, most of this shallow, but down closer to the reservoir itself, it does deepen. On the way down to position himself to fly cast this deeper water, something pulled on Oliver's Wooly Bugger. I tried a Mepp's spinner in that deeper water, just to be sure.

On the way back up, we hit the holes, but took no strikes in return. The Mulhockaway is widely known for its wild browns, but I wasn't surprised they weren't evident to us, not after some experience these past five years fishing them here and there. But Oliver and I--more than five years ago--have caught them elsewhere. I had to remind him of one occasion when we did pretty well, and now another, on the North Branch Raritan headwaters, comes to mind. We caught a few there, too, and that's not doing badly in New Jersey.

http://littonsfishinglines.blogspot.com/2014/11/fly-fished-somerset-county-nj-trout.html