My old friend and fishing buddy, Mark Tavern, and I had planned a three-day weekend on the river, but the place we planned to camp was already occupied with tents and fishermen when we arrived.

Where to cast?

So we picked out a remote spot on the map of the Deerfield, drove to the home of the people living closest to where we wanted to fish, and politely asked permission to fish and camp by the river for the weekend.

To our surprise, the owners of the property said they would be delighted to allow us access. They also said that nobody had fished their section of the river in quite a while as far as they knew. (I asked Mark to pinch me to see if I was dreaming.)

We hiked down to a spot where river flowed from a beautiful shallow run over a small cobblestone dam into a deep and promising pool directly across from our campsite. To top it all off, there was a hatch going on, and trout were rising right before our eyes.

I didn't waste any time asking to be pinched. I didn't care if this was a dream . . . all I wanted to do right then was float a dry fly over those rising fish. Mark and I forgot about our waders and hurriedly assembled our rods. Without speaking, we crept out on the exposed rocks.

Banner Beginning

I tied on a fly, chose my target, stripped off some line, and promptly wrapped my fly around the tree behind me. I looked upriver to see Mark laughing at me as he landed a 12-inch brown trout just as the hatch was ending.

No one else in sight

Later that day, during the evening hatch, I landed a number of nice 12- to 14-inch brown trout on a #14 Parachute Adams, and landed my best fish of the day just as the last light was draining from the spring sky.

I had worked my way upstream over some deadfalls and large rocks, and was standing close to shore in waist-deep water. From there I could see a decent-looking fish greedily gulping down flies as they floated over him in an eddy directly across the river from me.

Only 20 feet separated us, but I had no room to back cast and several tricky currents flowed between the trout and me. I stripped out some line and rolled a cast across the river, wiggling the tip of my rod, hoping to put enough curves in the line to give my fly a few seconds of drag-free drift.

After a few tries I got it right, and he gulped down my fly. I set the hook and landed the 16-inch brown quickly. Mark and I probably caught fifteen fish between us that day, a great start to our trip. But the big fish of the weekend didn't show until the next morning.