The theory that brook trout hit bright flies was tested one day on this stretch of Willowemoc Creek, near the Conklin covered bridge, by Ed Van Put."I was fishing with two wet flies, a Hare's Ear on the point and a Royal Coachman as a dropper and I caught eight or nine fish, browns and brookies. Every brown hit the Hare's Ear and every brookie hit the Royal Coachman. It was classic, by the book, fishing!"
Because of its many well-developed tributaries Fir, Mongaup, Sprague, Little Beaverkill, Cattail, Stewart one of the best ways to fish the Willowemoc is off the mouths of these feeder streams, especially, when the trout are getting ready to go up them to spawn. The Department of Environmental Conservation stocked just below one of them in September a few years ago and counted two dozen fish fifteen to sixteen inches long. The pools above and below these tributaries are also good places to fish.
The lower Willowemoc between Livingston Manor and Roscoe opens up and becomes quite a good-sized trout stream. It varies from forty to one hundred feet wide. The wading is easy and there is a good mixture of riffles and pools. The pools are three to five feet deep, the notable exception being the Sherwood Flats pool. It appeared almost overnight when an ice jam forced the water beneath to dig out its fifteen-foot depth. Pools of this sort are, of course, ephemeral and a flood of only average proportions could fill it up as quickly as it got dug.
Bankside cover along these last seven and a half miles of the river thins out a lot. Stretches of completely open river alternate with stretches lined by maples, oaks, sycamores. The hemlocks arc gone except on a few steep banks that slant sharply into the river.
The best fly fishing today on the Willowemoc is in the 2.4-mile no-kill section extending from Bascom Brook to the first highway overpass below Hazel Brook. Inaugurated in 1969, the Willowemoc no-kill is every bit as productive as the one established on the Beaverkill four years earlier. If there is a difference, it lies once again in the area of notoriety; the Willowemoc did not enjoy, as early as its more famous neighbor, the naming of its pools and runs. There used to be speculation, before most of the pools were named in 1982, that the Willowemoc no-kill angler was more secure, that he didn't need the recognition from being able to pull up to the Antrim bar and say, "The strangest thing happened to me this morning as I was fishing in the head of Cairns's. . ."
The state conservation department ran a creel census the first and second years of the Willowemoc no-kill, comparing the effect of the new regulations artificial lures only and no fish in possession with those on the rest of the river. They found that four times more trout were caught by fishermen in the no-kill area in the first year alone. In the second year, both the number of fishermen and the trout caught per trip increased substantially, strong testimony to the success of these special regulations.
The best time to fish the Willowemoc no-kill is from April to June. In July and August, when the water warms up, the trout feed less and lose weight ("slink out," as Ed Van Put says). They reawaken when the stream cools in September but are already moving out to spawn. By October the mature fish are gone to the tributaries.
In the no-kill from April to June, you catch a lot of twelve- to fifteen-inch trout, a few in the 20-inch range. These are mostly hatchery fish, including holdovers about 90% according to the 1969/70 creel census. In spite of a rich supply of stream insects, the lower Willowemoc depends on hatchery trout. The spawning tributaries are too far away from the no-kill for the young fish to come back with their parents in meaningful numbers.
In the second year of the Willowemoc no-kill, Ed Van Put ran his own test of the fishing conditions. "I fished down to Hazel Bridge one day, covering about a mile of the no-kill, swinging a pair of wet flies on about ten to fifteen feet of line, just to see how many fish I could catch. In two and a half hours, I caught 54 fish, lots of elevens and twelves, nothing over fourteen inches, but everything was right temperatures, water flows, bugs on the water, time of day, and, luckily, the fish were on the bite!"
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