Feb 18, 2022 4 min read

Trout season is fast approaching. I was thinking back to a day when my whole family was out fishing the small-but-beautiful stream of Colgrove.

It was early spring as we bounced along the rutted logging road up the big mountain in McKean County. It is located 6.3 miles from the town of Smethport.

We had fished this stream before catching such beautiful Brookies we decided to go back and explore it a little further upstream. The stream then was wild and unpopulated with few fisherpersons upon its banks. The stream itself is small but clean and deep with beautiful pockets and cover. The native Brookies are plentiful and still there to this day.

We reached a spot higher up than we had previously fished, where someone yelled “Stop! Look at that beautiful hole.” This was usually me but might have been Eileen. The kids were fighting over something and a bit grumpy but here we were. We piled out and everyone collected their gear. Eileen admonished all to watch for snakes and off we went.

I took Kathy and headed upstream while Eileen took Pat to the big hole. Kathy and I preferred to move so this was the usual setup. We walked in silence up the stream along the logging road, staying out of the ruts with an eye on the stream. When we were well upstream, we cut over to the stream spacing ourselves out along the bank. I flicked my rooster tail out into a wide place on the stream where I saw a nice undercut bank with some ripples. My daughter moved a little space downstream to cast her worm in above a tree that formed a small pool below it. She would drift that worm in and see what happened.

Suddenly, I had a big Brookie and we were fishing. Brook Trout fight surprisingly hard on light tackle, and it is fun to catch them. This trout put up a nice fight and was a beautiful speckled 10-inch trout. This would be our average-sized trout that day. Kathy had four hooked and in the creel, between 9-12 inches, within an hour. The grumpy look was gone, and she was in her trout fishing element.

We just kept moving along downstream, working our way back to Eileen and Pat. I hooked a nice-sized Brown Trout in a pool I could almost jump across. But I could see it was cut back under the bank and held enough water to be attractive to such a trout.

We got back to Pat with a creel full of trout having limited out. Eileen was reeling in a nice Brookie from very close to the same hole she had started at. Pat had a very big Brookie we all admired, and everyone was happy.

I started cleaning fish with the two kids. When they were done, I looked up at Eileen, who was still fishing and catching Brookies and releasing them. “Well,” I asked, “do you want me to clean yours?” “No,” she stated. “I let them all go.”

“What?” I asked. “Why?”

“Because I knew you and the kids would keep all of yours and we can’t eat that much tonight,” she responded.

Can’t argue with that logic now, can I?

So, on the way back I was dreaming of crispy fried trout while the kid’s road in the bed of the truck for fun. The road, being very bumpy, I had to drive slowly but they loved bumping along back there saying it was better than Kennywood. They screeched and yelled and giggled all the way back to the road and you would have thought they were the closest of friends, just for that moment. We stopped at the hard road to get them on board and went into Smethport to the Dairy Queen on the way back to the cabin. Life was good.

Trout fishing is like that for us. A family affair that now lies with the kids to pass on to the grandkids. I hope you are preparing to take your family out this spring, it will be here soon enough.