Nestled up in the Adirondack Mountains, the West Branch of the Ausable is a river that I just recently discovered. The Ausable is one of those places that really draws you in, and once you’re there you don’t want to leave. The river offers just about any kind of fishing you can want. Pocket water, deep pools, long runs, still slow moving currents great for dries. It has it all.

Even in the middle of July, the fishing here is great. I found myself pulling in fish after fish nearly anywhere I was on the river. Turning over some rocks revealed a pretty decent prevalence of stone fly nymphs, that as well as the rocks are absolutely covered in stonefly shell casings. That being said, I had very good luck with black stonefly and copper john zebra nymphs, using a small caddis pupa as a dropper. The sun was out and about throughout the day, so I spent most of the morning and afternoon nymphing under an indicator. There were only a couple other people on the stretch of the river, so thankfully I was able to make my way up and down stream unabated. I spent a lot of time working some nice little pools like this:

The afternoon was productive and I brought quite a few browns and rainbows to my net. Nothing monstrous, or brag worthy, but there were quite a few nice fish. Here are some of them:

As the day turned into evening, a nice hatch was going on, so I switched over to dries. There was a mahogany and sulfur dun hatch, as well as quite a few caddis flying around. The action really picked up on the dries. I didn’t catch anything too big, but I’ve always found dry fly fishing to be so much more satisfying than nymphing. I took most of the fish that I caught on a size 14 sulfur dun pattern, it seemed to draw a fish to it just about every other cast, so I didn’t bother mixing it up too much. I didn’t bother with many pictures, as most of these guys were under 12″:

All in all a great day of fishing. I also brought my dad with me on this trip. He’s relatively new to fly fishing, so I was happy to give him a few pointers. He managed to hook the biggest fish of the day, but of course it broke off before we could get it to the net. My good friend I mentioned from one of my earlier posts is coming out from Oregon, and we plan on heading back this weekend in the hunt for brookies. Stay tuned for updates. Cheers and tight lines!