06/09/2015 – Rain today but not much wind.  So I loaded the canoe and headed upriver towards The Forks.  I launched my canoe on the 201 side of the river and poled up and across the Kennebec planing to explore another tributary.  The flow was moderate and without the 10-15 mph winds we’ve been having I made good progress.

I pulled the canoe up (way up) onto the bank, flipped it over to keep my gear dry and started hiking. It wasn’t a bad hike, in fact, hiking was easy as I found myself on part of the Appalachian Trail.  I had blazes and signposts showing me the way.

The stream was smaller than I had expected and the gradient was steep which made for lots of plunge pools and pockets.  Not many fish, however. I’m afraid that part of it never changed.  I caught fish – mostly small Brook Trout but there were quite a few small Landlocked Salmon hanging out as well.

And then I found the waterfall with a pretty good size pool that just yelled “Here’s where the big one hangs out!”  But it wasn’t to be.   No big fish there – at least not this trip.  I don’t doubt that pool occasionally holds a nice fish or two but it didn’t yield any big ones to my offerings.

One thing that makes me think that pool holds some nice fish is someone hung a rope from a stout tree providing an assist to anyone climbing down to or up from the pool.  Perhaps swimmers and hikers made the effort to do that but I like to think it was a fisherman.

After hiking another mile or so up the stream with mostly the same results and a pounding rain I decided to head back. One nice thing about a canoe is the ability to carry gear – lots of gear – and I was some happy to have a DRY change of clothes and a terrycloth towel.

Especially a towel that says Jameson on it –  it just seems that towel works better than most. It dries me and gets me thinking about how a hot toddy is a perfect end to a wet but fun afternoon and evening.

A fellow fly tyer generously sent me a few cards of wool he had dyed.  The color he was looking for when he dyed the wool is … elusive. “Orange-yellow spun fur or wool applied loosely or picked out to make it fuzzy” is how Joe Bates, Jr. described the body color of a Warden’s Worry in his wonderful book: “Streamers and Bucktails.”

It turns out there are almost as many shades of “orange-yellow” out there as there are people who tie the Warden’s Worry. Happily the “orange-yellow” shade he ended up with is a close match to the shade I like.

Of course I had to sit down and tie a few just to see how they would look. Like many who tie flies I make subtle changes to patterns when I’m tying for myself.  When tying the Warden’s Worry I make two in particular.

The first change is substituting marabou for the wound hackle collar “gathered downward” into a beard.  The second change is substituting the brown hair from a yellow bucktail for the “light brown bucktail” used in the original pattern. Neither change is dramatic and both have a reason.

When held in the hand, the finished fly with a marabou beard simply “looks” better to me than the hackle collared finish fly and the marabou beard doesn’t require wrapping hackle. Looking better and being easier to tie seem like good reasons to me so that’s the way I tie them. As a bonus the fish don’t seem to mind the change. One good reason for tying flies is that you get to – tie them the way YOU like them.

Using the brown hair from a bucktail that has been dyed yellow for the wing isn’t a change so much as it’s simply the way I was taught.  I guess the end result actually follows the original recipe. The wing is indeed “light brown” perhaps a little lighter than most having been dyed bright yellow. Fortunately the fish don’t seem to mind this small change either.

Whichever way it is tied the pattern has been around since Joe Stickney, of Saco, Maine dreamed it up in 1930 and it catches fish to this day.  I’ve asked people to weigh in one way or the other on the subject of the beard.  If you care to vote for the traditional or the marabou beard please visit the forum and cast a vote.