Housatonic River fishing report

I feel like my current fishing world can be best summed up by Ray Davies, who wrote, “The news was so bad that I fell out of bed.”

The fishing on Block was soul-crushingly bad. This is the third straight down year, and I felt lucky to have landed five stripers in seven nights. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Four skunks in the mix. (Really?) My biggest fish was 22″, bringing my streak of not landing a keeper or better to three years. How far that shore fishery has fallen!

Back on the home front, Mother Nature and the MDC are wreaking havoc upon the Farmington River. A couple days from now is my traditional date to go fish the dorothea at a favorite mark, but that’s obviously not going to happen. To add insult to injury, I’ve had to cancel both wet fly lessons scheduled for this week.

Normally, I’d console myself by heading to the Housatonic, but that river is also experiencing catastrophic water levels. No smallmouth for you! And no smallmouth for me, either. The white fly hatch will come and go, and none of us will be able to enjoy fishing it. Maybe the Hous will come down to a dry/wet fly fishable level in 2-3 weeks. That’s assuming we don’t get pounded by rain…again. This is now four consecutive alternating years of flood, then drought. It’s the new normal, and it sucks for all of us. What’s worse, it can’t be good for the ecosystem. Would a happy medium be too much to ask? Perhaps the silver lining will be more trout holding over to this fall. We shall see.

**Bloody hell! 5,500cfs is a long way from being even remotely fishable.**

Finally, good reader, I must apologize for all this doom and gloom. I try to be a positive force, but I also feel compelled to tell it like it is. I suppose I could use this time to prep my fall striper box, or my winter nymph box, or even get a head start on some steelhead flies. Maybe some bluegills down at the pond on Elk Hair Caddis and a six-foot glass rod would cheer me up? Now there’s a thought…

It used to be that you’d show up at the Hous in the July with a fly rod and a Woolly Bugger and you couldn’t keep the smallmouth off your fly. You might try to keep count, but somewhere after the second dozen it all became a blur. If you were fishing early morning or late afternoon, with the sun tucked safely behind the hills, entire stretches of the river would light up. At dusk, the river was boiling.

Those days are over. At the very least, the Housatonic River smallmouth population has been dramatically reduced. At the worst, we have a crash.

The fishery has been in decline for several years now. Marks where I was catching dozens of bass five years ago began their slide around 2019, and now it’s to the point where I’m catching one…or two…or none. This isn’t a localized problem; I’ve been covering water from Falls Village, way above the TMA, down to Kent. Miles and miles of river. And the fish just ain’t there.

I’ve got some calls into the CT DEEP to discuss the situation, and I’ll let you know what I find out. In the meantime, save your fishing chips for other rivers.

This video is from 2018. That late afternoon, I took bass after bass after bass on a Gurgler…then at dusk, I really got good. I fished this mark last night and in 45 minutes all I could manage was two fish.