The Upper Delaware is the only trout river we know of that can make a grown man feel like he has been personally insulted by an insect. The fish there are wild browns, not stocked ones, born in the river and educated by every angler who has floated it since the reservoirs went in, and they hold in water so clear and so slow that they get a long look at everything. A brown trout on the Beaverkill will forgive a sloppy cast. A brown trout on the main stem of the Delaware will drift back under your fly for four feet, examine it the way a jeweler examines a stone, and then refuse it and go back to eating the real ones an inch away.
September is when the river gets good and gets hard at the same time. The cold water coming out of the bottom of the reservoirs has the fish comfortable and feeding all evening, the crowds have gone home to their fall obligations, and the bugs shrink. In June you are fishing a mayfly you can see from the boat. By September you are fishing something the size of a comma, a little olive or a trico spinner, on a leader long enough to require its own zip code, tied to tippet so fine you have to stop trusting your hands and start trusting your knots.
We floated a stretch with a guide who rows a wooden drift boat he built himself and who spends the entire day telling you not to cast yet. That is the actual instruction. Not yet. Not yet. He puts the boat above a fish that is rising in a seam you would have poled right past, holds the oars, waits for the trout to establish a rhythm, and then tells you to put it four feet upstream and let it come. The cast is the easy part. The hard part is the six minutes of doing nothing beforehand, which is where most of us fall apart.
The evening rise arrived the way it always does, which is to say all at once and about twenty minutes before you can no longer see. The flat above a bend went from empty water to a page full of dimples. Fish everywhere, big ones sipping so gently it barely broke the film, and the whole river smelling like cold stone and hemlock. Two casts got refused. The third one got taken with no drama at all, just the little dimple closing over a fly we had lost track of, and then a wild brown of about nineteen inches went straight downstream into the dark and made the reel say something.
We landed it, held it in the current until it kicked off on its own, and stood there in the last of the light with everything gone grey. The guide had already reeled up. He said we should have been on the water an hour earlier, which is what guides say, and which on that river happens to be true every single day of the year.
Cold water days are hoodie days. See our custom boat hoodies and sweatshirts, drawn from a photo of your own boat.