I dyed a few emu feathers cognac brown, which gave a warm burnt-orange shade, and used them to tie a couple of Sisevac Caddis dries [with the emu as wing/body/hackle]. Alongside my regular pattern, these warmer versions should be a closer match for the orange tones of the naturals: Stenophylax, Potamophylax, Halesus, and other caddisflies found on the Crnica.
I hope to give them a proper test there next May.
The other evening I was paging through Schwiebert’s Nymphs, admiring his hand-drawn color plates of natural insects, when the book carried me back to the Crnica, in Serbia’s Kučaj Mountains, and my early years of fly fishing.
Back then I was trying to become a better angler by reading everything I could find: books, magazines, anything that might help. Most of my catches were rainbow trout that had escaped from the local hatchery. I did catch some native browns, but the smaller rainbows were much easier targets for a young angler.
It was a beautiful spring day. The blues and greens were almost impossibly intense: a spotless sky, bright water, and tunnels of willows and hawthorns hanging over the stream. Rainbows held beneath the drooping branches on both sides of the main flow, and their eager, splashy rises were easy to spot.
On my leader was a brown Voljč-style sedge tied by Andrija Urban. My rod was rather crude for this lovely limestone stream: a dinosaur of a Silstar Composite, 8½ feet long and rated for a six-weight line. It threw a line well enough, though.
I cast the sedge just above the nearest rise, and my tippet caught on an overhanging branch. I tried to free it from a distance, afraid of spooking the fish. The fly stayed a hand’s breadth above the water, twitching in the breeze, right over the spot where I had seen several quick splashes.
And then came a small miracle.
The trout leaped out of the water and took my fly straight out of the air. It hooked itself, the tippet pulled free of the branch, and a few minutes later I was admiring a bright little rainbow in my hand.
None of the books I had read had a chapter on this. In all the decades of fly fishing since, I have never managed to repeat that feat.
Photographed in October 2010 in Iowa's Driftless Area. These images have been revisited and edited in 2026, with the aim of preserving the character of the original photographs.
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Twisted, speckled wool creates a segmented body with little protrusions suggesting abdominal gills. A spiky blend of squirrel and dark olive-brown Angora goat finishes the thorax.
Fun tying with home-blended blue dubbing. Two Quasimodo PT nymphs, with a little color of their own.
Golden pilsners and a warm afternoon at the vise. All-around caddis larvae and summer spinners in colors for favorite streams, along with small streamers for landlocked salmon.
Budvar, Pilsner Urquell, and a smogarsbord of flies. A pretty chill afternoon.
October 22, 2017.
One of those late-October albie days you never quite forget.
A beautiful fish, my own-built 10-weight, and my Abel Super 9. The albie took off on a blistering run through the harbor, then wrapped my fly line around a buoy rope. For a moment, I thought I’d lose both the fish and the line.
Somehow, I worked through the mess and brought the fish to hand. A little luck, a little persistence, and one unforgettable fight.
Looking back at this photograph, I can almost feel that fish pulling again. October on the New England coast has a character all its own. Some days stay with you long after the season ends—and make you hope the next one is just around the corner.
The October Caddis of New England, Pycnopsyche, and the great autumn limnephilids of Europe belong to different evolutionary lineages, yet occupy remarkably similar ecological worlds.
On the Crnica in Serbia, the limestone stream enters autumn beneath the same kind of seasonal rhythm that I find in New England rivers thousands of miles away.
Different continents, different genera, different species—but the same beautiful solution to the changing season.
For a fly angler, these connections make October feel almost like Christmas. You begin to look at the river not as two places, but as one enormous natural history.
Pupae illustration: E. Schweibert, from Nymphs.
I fished today on a beautiful early autumn day. I picked a protected harbor where, historically, schools of peanut bunker and visible blitzing stripers have been almost a certainty at this time of year.
We had a nor’easter last weekend, but the water was very clean. I found no bait and no fish. The place was completely deserted—dead. There was no sign of life. I saw perhaps three single cormorants, spread out over acres of ocean. Even the birds were gone.
It has been the most difficult striper season I have experienced since I started fly fishing for them in the early 1990s. It feels as though all my usual spots have been more or less dead throughout the entire summer. The hardtail season has also been disappointing for shore anglers.
October is here. I plan to make a few more trips to Rhode Island, but I have given up on the idea of saving the season in any meaningful way.
For now, it is simply a stalled season.
The season is changing.
A dram for the farewell to summer, with my trusty Pezon-inspired travel glass rod.
Scarabus seems to belong with the ghosts of past summers.
I returned to Sisevac on Sunday, a brief visit before leaving Serbia. This was not a fishing trip. My cousin Đorđe and I drove from Jagodina after the family wedding. Along the way, we stopped at an old soda shop and had an early-morning burek in Ćuprija.
The Crnica greeted us with its lazy autumn murmur, already carrying the quiet, nostalgic character of an early fall day. Notonecta swimmers were all over the slower sections, moving busily around. There were no obvious hatches, and I saw little trout activity. Some of the surrounding trees had already begun to turn brown, not from the cold as they would in a New England autumn, but from the prolonged drought. Others were simply becoming darker green or yellow, with that withered look. It was not the sort of day that invited much fishing.
But the low water offered something else: a different view of the river.
Sections that had been too deep, fast, or awkward to approach in May were now accessible. New pockets, seams and small runs appeared between the exposed rocks, and the reduced current made it possible to see much more clearly how the stream divided around the bed structure. Wading and casting positions that simply did not exist at higher water were now possible
Some of these newly revealed sections looked surprisingly fishable. I found myself studying the river rather than looking for rising trout—trying to understand where the current would hold fish when the water returned.
The tradeoff is obvious. There is much less water, potentially warmer conditions, and considerably less visible trout activity. Yet the low autumn flow also exposes another side of the Crnica. The river becomes almost a map of itself, revealing its structure and showing possibilities that remain hidden beneath the higher spring water.
For a short visit, that may have been the most interesting thing I brought home from Sisevac: not a fish, but a better understanding of the river.
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