December 23, 2023

As I started writing this, I was in Texas wrapping up my annual bowhunting trip. It amuses me that the folks there think it is unbearably cold in December when it is 40 degrees out!
They wouldn’t like our December. When we got home, we found our typical winter weather and with it, the official kickoff of my fly tying season— time to fill up the fly boxes for the coming spring in the Adirondacks, including some flies for trout pond fishing.

Ponds and lakes are often the best place to start flyfishing in the Adirondacks as the
spring runoff and rainfall entering streams usually keeps them high and cold. For fly anglers, this doesn’t make for productive conditions. Our fun typically doesn’t start until water temperatures hit the mid 50’s. The ponds and lakes can have actively feeding trout well before things heat up in the streams. Once the ice melts trout start feeding on the spring bounty as soon as the sun warms up the shallow areas, and a simple float tube and some fins will get you on the water.

Food sources for stillwater trout in the Adirondacks are much different than the insect life
found in the streams. One of the biggest sources of springtime food are damsel and dragonfly nymphs. In early spring, these nymphs swim towards shore where they eventually hatch. Trout feed on any of the nymphs that they can get. My usual fishing strategy for damselfly or dragonfly nymphs is to cast out into deeper water with a sink-tip line and retrieve the fly in little twitches like the real thing heading toward shore.

One of the oddest foods pond trout hit are salamanders. I learned this from Adirondack
Fishing Guide, Joe Hackett. He even developed his own fly pattern to match the salamanders that end up getting washed into the ponds after a good rain, one he tied from scraps of an old fur coat. A salamander is a big meal for a trout and an easy one they won’t ignore. I have a little more refined pattern of my own that I tie as a jointed fly, giving it plenty of motion.

Some ponds have leeches, and they are another food source for springtime. Simple leech
patterns or even a Wooly Bugger will work on a slow twist retrieve on a sink-tip line if that is what they are interested in. Ponds typically don’t get a lot of dry fly activity, but it does happen. A couple of years ago I was paddling around a Warren County pond in the spring and the trout started rising to a midge hatch. Fortunately, I had some midges along and was able to paddle to shore and switch to a floating line and immediately started catching rising fish on a Griffith’s Gnat. Midges are an important food source in stillwaters, and even though they are tiny, trout feed on them. Midge larvae are another good subsurface pattern for springtime.

Long winters make springtime in the Adirondacks magical. For fly anglers, early spring
isn’t always the best, but putting a little time into fishing trout ponds or lakes before things heat up in the streams is a lot of fun. If you can shift gears and match the hatches in the ponds, it can be really productive too!.