Why a creek chub got me jacked and beaver dams are whack | Trip Report

My lifer creek chub, a native gem.

Rough fish. Trash fish. Minnows. Bait. Disparaging names abound for so many fish species that swim in American waters. Fish that the majority of anglers have decided, for one reason or another, to avoid, arbitrarily treating them as mere annoyances getting in the way of more cherished fish.

Count me among the growing group of anglers that who see through these outdated notions. Especially when it comes to native fish.

Native fish populations, ones that have existed in the same places for thousands of years and against all odds survived the human onslaught of the last 200, should be cherished, no matter their size or reputation. And protected, too, as essential species within their ecosystems.

But Brook trout, at least in their native Eastern range, have never been considered trash fish. And they were my primary target on a recent day off, when I took a drive to New Jersey for some late February fly fishing. But it was a different native species, one that never gets any respect, that stole the show.

The stream I was headed for was one I knew well. I regularly fished its lower reaches for smallmouth in the warmer months, and a few times I’d attempted to find wild trout in its higher reaches.

But even farther upstream, just before a large dam that holds back a deep reservoir, there’s a small stretch that’s managed purely as a wild native brook trout stream. And this section I’d never laid eyes on.

When I arrived, I was surprised by the layout of the area and the steep elevation changes. I can’t tell you how often the mental image I’ve created of a fishing spot is dead wrong, having been fooled by deceiving Google Maps satellite images, which never give you a good feel for the topography.

I started out by trying to reach the section of the stream closest to the gravel parking lot, but it wasn’t easy. I had to fight through thick briar patches and deep mud, unexpectedly plunging to my knees in the muck every few steps.

But there was another problem when I got my first glimpse of the water. What was supposed to be a tiny, trickling stream below a dam was instead a glacially-moving, flooded expanse of shallow swampy water.

I couldn't figure out what was going on but decided to exit the bush and follow some well-worn paths away from the river until I reached a downstream section that looked more like, well, a stream.

The hike was a strange one, too. Every 100 yards or so NO HUNTING signs were posted on trees. Some were from the local nature conservancy, others from the state and still more that looked like private signs.

Even stranger was that up in the trees, interspersed between these many signs, were hunting stands. A lot of them. In fact, they outnumbered the signs. With tracks from deer and other critters everywhere, I started imagining a local feud between the hunters and the non-hunters tearing the small community apart.

Signs of deer and hunting were everywhere.

Eventually the stream started looking like one, and I cut off the trail to throw my first casts. It was a struggle from the start, with more briars and dense brush making access difficult. I found myself struggling to get into good-looking spots, only to spook all the fish in the process.

Except for one hole. Two hours in, with hope dimming, I tossed my hopper-dropper rig into a good-looking run between two rocks. The dry fly plunged under the water and I struck, with a small fish pulling back on the nymph.

My assumptions that it was a brook trout were discarded when, amid the fight, I noticed a distinct lateral line on its flank. My first thought: had a rainbow trout invaded this brookie sanctuary?

But once in the net, I realized it was something, at least in my eyes, far better than an invasive trout: a creek chub.

My only catch of the day, but I’ll take it.

Creek chub definitely find themselves among the maligned fishes of the U.S., but they are native to the stream I was fishing. Plus, I had somehow gone decades of fishing without every catching one. It was my lifer creek chub, late but still welcome.

Laugh all you want, but I was pumped, especially after failing to get a bite all day. I took a few photos and then revived him in slower water until he jetted off.

As I continued up the stream, I came across the best-looking hole yet, a five-foot deep plunge pool running up against a tangle of logs and branches with a deep undercut.

On my second cast, I carefully watched as a fish appeared underneath the dry before grabbing it from the underside without breaking the surface of the water.

I hit and hooked him. He turned hard to get away, revealing the entire side of what appeared to be a sizable 10-inch brookie. But after a few more tugs he pulled the hook and my line went slack.

Farther upstream, and beginning to near the flooded parking area, I finally realized what had caused the bizarre pond-like conditions.

Right in front of me in the stream stood an exquisitely-crafted beaver dam, three feet high and at least 20 yards across. It was so big, it had turned what should have been a stream just a few feet wide into a several-acre pond more than 200 yards from one bank to the other.

One of the biggest beaver dams I’ve ever seen, and it wasn’t the only one…

As I continued up the “stream,” hundreds of small stumps lined the bank, with the distinctive tooth markings of a beaver gnawed into all of them. Nearly every sapling of a certain size had been chopped down to create the massive dam I’d come across. They’d even gone after the bigger trees too, giving up after a while but not before cutting large wedges into the trunks.

The beavers were hard at work.

Some trees proved too big for the beavers.

The stumps continued three hundred yards upstream, all the way to a second beaver dam, smaller than the first, but still sizable in its own right.

The twin dams had certainly ruined a small section of the stream for trout fishing, at least temporarily. But I could hardly blame them. Humans had built a far bigger, far more destructive dam long ago just a quarter mile upstream. And a few more downstream, too.

While I felt satisfied with my chub and the experience as a whole, I also left thinking that might be the last time I try that particular spot for a while.

SONG OF THE TRIP

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